Strengths and Decision-Making: The Rockefeller Professional Preparation Program

In the Rockefeller Professional Preparation Program’s first session of 2018 Spring, participants had the opportunity to discover how we, as busy Dartmouth students, can foster our ability to make decisions, understand our strengths and communicate to help design our lives.

Eugene Korsunskiy, a lecturer at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, actively engaged participants with wrestling the idea of how we make decisions in life. Participants reflected on how they balance the energy in their lives and discussed, as a group, strategies for maintaining a steady energy supply. While moving on to speak about decision making, Korsunskiy emphasized the need to trust your gut and avoid dwelling on alternative options.

Before coming to the first session, students took the Clifton StrengthsFinder online assessment to identify their five most significant strengths. Although being very fast-paced, the test had the goal of determining what your instinctual answer would be, thus revealing your true self. At the first session, participants then drew connections with their strengths and recent experiences and, by sharing with others, were able to better understand how to apply their strengths to their every day lives.

As the session wrapped up, participants practiced firsthand the ease of networking, or as Korsunskiy put it, asking for directions. They left with not only potential connections to make, but also with a better picture of what is means to be proactive with yourself in your life - reaching out to join the conversation, narrowing down concrete options, and connecting where we find energy in life to our individual strengths.