Nominations for NSU’s annual Leadership Awards closed on March 23 and nominees can expect their invitations to the April 12 award ceremony to arrive soon.
The Leadership Awards is an invite-only collaboration between Student Leadership and Civic Engagement and Campus Life and Student Engagement designed to recognize the work of students across campus, whether that be presidents of student organizations, student employees or students who work hard to better the university but often go unnoticed.
Garrett Horejsi, graduate assistant for student leadership and civic engagement programs, helped plan the awards with Renae Bollibon, graduate assistant for Greek Life. Horejsi said that recognizing student leaders on campus is important.
“Especially for student organizations or student leaders who are doing the same thing over and over again — so they’re planning events every week or every month or several times a year — they can kind of get lost in the shuffle,” Horejsi said. “I think that work is important for a college because we hope that these are events that help them [students] learn outside the classroom. So I think it’s important to recognize and hopefully encourage students who are doing these events.”
Award-winners will be determined through a two-step process. First, applications will be reviewed by “a variety of staff and graduate assistant reviewers” who will rate the application’s strength. Then the student committee in charge of the award show will review the strongest applications and make a decision.
“A lot of the work that gets done, gets done by our committee of students,” said Bollibon. “So a lot of this is overseen by graduate assistants but a lot of the logistics are run by our students. They deserve a lot of credit.”
According to Horejsi, this process was designed to ensure fairness.
“We do the two-step process to try to get out as much bias as possible,” he said.
The Leadership Awards also takes the time to recognize students who will receive pins for their work or activities during the school year such as going on Sharks and Service trips or taking leadership classes. Overall the awards are about recognizing students.
“We do this for the students,” said Bollibon. “We want them to understand that we appreciate the hard work that they put into their organizations and events, the service hours that they put in, the work that they out in for departments. We want them to know that we as staff, and other students in the community, recognize their hard work.”
