The Business Leadership Community, formerly the Business Leadership Club had a kickoff pizza party for BC students on Jan. 12. Students ate lunch and played bingo for prizes in room C130.
Leslie Lum, adviser to the BLC, said the BLC holds 18 events a year which are attended by over 2,000 students in total. Lum said that BC is the biggest transfer college of business students to the University of Washington’s school of business.
Richard Millard is the writing skills assessment coordinator for the BLC. The WSA is an exam that business students need to take to be admitted to UW. Millard puts together workshops to help students study and practice for the exam in a similar environment to the one they’ll take the test in. Millard described the exam as high stress since it is timed, handwritten and counts for 35 percent of the business school application.
Millard said there are up to six mock exams a year. The next ones coming up will be on Jan. 25 and Feb. 16 at 2:30 p.m. in room D106. Afterwards, the tests will be graded by English professors and there will be an opportunity for students to get feedback on their writing.
“To try and get people prepared for that we put on these workshops,” said Judith Paquette, another BLC advisor. Paquette also mentioned that BC is the only community college that hosts these workshops.
Jennifer Wieszniewski is one of the co-presidents of the BLC. She said that she got involved after attending a BLC event last year, starting out as treasurer before running for president.
She said that the event was a “kickoff to introduce everyone,” and that regular meetings will resume Jan. 19. During the weekly meetings, there is a selected topic of focus and students are usually introduced to a guest speaker. Past guest speakers include the founder of Kukai Ramen Brandon Ting, CEO of Ivar’s Robert Donegan, and Costco founder Jeffrey Brotman.
“People assume the Business Leadership Community is for business majors,” said Millard, but according to him the BLC is less about majoring in business and more about learning about working in a business.
In May, the BLC has an alumni event planned. In past years, there have been about 200 attendees, 50 of which are alumni. Lum said that the BLC has alumni all over the country and all over the world, some of whom continued schooling in state, and some who went out of state or overseas. “They keep in touch with us and help our students too,” said Lum.
On Jan. 19, during the first official meeting of the BLC, Wieszniewski said that a speaker from the HR department of INRIX will come talk to students about optimizing their LinkedIn profile. Wieszniewski also said that INRIX is “the leading provider of traffic information.”
This quarter BLC meetings will be held on Tuesdays from 2:45 to 3:30 p.m. in room C225.