NCLCA Conference

I just returned from the 2006 National College Learning Center Association conference in Harrisburg, PA! What a wonderful week. I flew from Dickinson (Theodore Roosevelt Regional Airport, home of unlimited free parking!) to Denver, from Denver to Washington, D.C. (Dulles), and from Washington to Harrisburg on Tuesday, October 3. I attended pre-conference sessions on Wednesday, then two days of official conference activities Thursday and Friday, then a post-conference session on Saturday. It was cheaper for me to stay another night and fly home today, so I did.

I knew next to nothing about NCLCA or its mission or its members or its conference before my boss told me that she was sending me to it, so I didn't know what to expect. However, the conference sessions were very enlightening, and the networking was invaluable to me. NCLCA folks are very warm and welcoming and willing to share everything that they do if it will make another person's job at his/her own university or college a little easier.

I attended sessions on using data to evaluate the effectiveness of one's learning center, training students to tutor their peers, managing the students in your learning center's employ, and getting certified either as a learning center or as a learning center professional (or both, for that matter). Being so new to my own position in a learning center, I had much to learn from this conference, and I loved coming home with so much "stuff": handouts that others use in their own programs and, perhaps more importantly, business cards with contact information for the many friendly people I met who offered to share procedures and materials from their own learning centers.

Harrisburg was beautiful, and the restaurants at which I ate (with my new-found friends from across the country) served delicious food: lobster bisque, veal in a red wine reduction, grilled caesar salad in which the Romaine lettuce hearts themselves were grilled before being plated, and, of course, Troegs beer, a Pennsylvania brew. Next year's conference is in Atlanta, GA, and I'm interested in presenting at that conference. I'll have to plant that seed with my boss . . .