The Northwestern Center for Leadership has partnered with The New York Times to bring a new ambassador program to campus that will aim to connect leaders from a wide range of student groups.
Todd Murphy, associate director of the center, said students will use The New York Times content to start a dialogue about campus leadership. The news organization hopes to use the program at NU as a pilot and expand to other institutions of higher education, he said.
“We were trying to find another way to develop more dialogue about leadership on campus without starting up another class,” Murphy said. “We really want it to be student owned so they have a place to come together to talk about leadership.”
Murphy said the specific plans for the program are still tentative, but throughout meetings this quarter he and a group of active student leaders from across campus have developed a plan for three sessions, which will host about 20 to 30 leaders from a diverse array of student groups.
McCormick junior Alex Van Atta, who was chosen as an ambassador for the program, said students will begin the sessions by discussing an article from The New York Times within a broad topic, such as diversity and leadership. The group will then break into smaller groups for networking sessions, where they can communicate with each other about “best practices,” he said. The breakout sessions will allow leaders of large groups to share recruiting tactics with a those of smaller groups and will also present the opportunity for groups to collaborate on events. Van Atta, who serves as Associated Student Government student life vice president, said this collaboration could help reduce excessive campus programming, a goal of ASG.
Van Atta said the sessions will begin during Spring Quarter and will likely end with a capstone event where the students will bring an editor or reporter from The New York Times to campus. He said he is excited to see how it evolves.
“That’s where a lot of the potential is,” he said. “It can be anything we want it to be right now.”
Van Atta is one of several campus leaders involved with the planning of the ambassador program. He said he has also collaborated with Weinberg senior Nicole Schindler, McCormick senior Kyra Woods, McCormick junior Sean Cabaniss and Medill sophomore Amy Li.
Murphy explained The New York Times wanted to sponsor the program to engage new readers. Li said she wanted to get involved with the new program because she thought it was really interesting that the publication wanted to have a lasting impact on students.
“They wanted to really cultivate a long-term loyalty to The New York Times,” Li said. “Luckily enough, Northwestern was chosen to be the pilot for this program.”
The New York Times ambassadors evolved out of cooperation between the Center for Leadership and the news organization to develop an online resource for college professors about leadership that launched last September. Murphy said the center had been trying to bring a new program to campus like this for years, and the newspaper wanted to try sponsoring it at NU first.
Li said she was “excited” to see where the program goes.
“This has the potential to not only impact Northwestern campus, but also other universities and tons and tons of other people later on,” Li said.
