Maria Herold | Clubs at Smith

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Hi, my name is Maria Harold and I am a current second year student in the full time smith NBA program. Uh soon to be an alumni as I'll be graduating in less than a month. Um and I'm really excited about the opportunities that I'll have post grad, but to reflect on something that was really meaningful to me over the past year of the program and you know two years, the program in general was the opportunity that I had to be president of the smith Association with Women mbas. So smith Association of Women NBS or Samba is a club on campus um that is specifically um aiming to support women in the business program in the NBA program and women as they go into their careers as they work through their internships and job offers and you know, any type of experience that people have in the business program. Um Samba is there to support the women in the program. I was the first year board member in my first two of them being program and then applied for and received the role of president, which was really exciting to me because I wanted to get involved in extracurricular activities and it was something that I was passionate about and as a woman in business, I'm obviously passionate about enhancing the role of women in business and making sure that um you know, there's fairness and equity and who had opportunities for women in business responsibilities that the role included. So it's been a little tough when club members are used to in person, club activities, really meaningful ones. How can we switch that over to a virtual environment and still make it meaningful? Still make it so that people women in the program and connect and really feel supported and connected during these trying times. So over the past year, myself and the vice president of finance, Rachel, we put on virtual events that we thought would be most impactful in this sort of environment. So we focused a little bit more on the community building side of the club versus the maybe more career focused for women activities in the hopes that these connection building activities would help women be able to better connect with people in their jobs most crab. So some of the events that we put on where a book club where we read a book by a woman writer and it happened based on the voting, it happened to be about um women at a startup, which was very interesting and led to really good discussion. We had a health and wellness session where we had a yoga class led by one of our first year members and then had a conversation with someone who had just gone through a mental wellness class about mental wellness specifically of women in the program. Something that was really great for me as president was opening applications for first year board members as a second year and helping these first year board members grow and learn how to be club leaders. All three of those first year board members did end up being the board for their second years of the people who just replaced us. Um and it's really great to see how excited they are about hopefully being in person having really meaningful activities, building on some of the activities that we organized, but also creating new ones that they saw an opportunity for maybe a gap in our, in our organization. That's something that I think organizations need to be constantly growing and learning and I love to see that they are going to be able to do that or samba.