What are you doing for Halloween?

Dressing up? Boring. Attending some Atlanta party? LAME.

What about coming to Egypt and attending ACTIVATE 2008. (So cool it even rhymes!)

Let me know if you have questions or want some more information!

Love from Egypt,

Maddie

Congratulations to Our LCP-elect 2009, Amira Choueiki!

We held elections for who would succeed me as Local Committee President of the Local Committee on Monday. The two candidates were Parampal Randhawa and Amira Choueiki.

Each had ten minutes to give a speech, followed by five minutes of question-and answering per candidate. Then the LC discussed them both with neither of them present, and they both came back into the room to receive one more round of questions.

Then we voted. Our LC uses a process called "range voting," which is more representative of the actual feelings regarding the candidates than the "one man, one vote" principle. And with that, Amira was elected as the Local Committee President of AIESEC at Georgia Tech 2009!

You can send your mind to her at choueiki@gatech.edu.

SoCoLDS 2008: The Leadership Revolution

This weekend, our regional conference was the best conference the Southern Comfort region has put on since we had our first SoCo RoKS in Spring 2006 in Jacksonville, FL. A number of factors converged to produce this perfect storm of AIESEC allsomeness.

First, our LCs have sufficiently built and maintained this year. UGA is coming back into their own in a strong way with nowhere to go but up, and Appalachian and UNC have grown explosively, while Atlanta has stayed strong as usual. Also six partners in change from AIESEC DC came down. Thus, the delegates capped off at 107 people, the most we were able to have for the event. The rooms were perfectly sized to make this number of people pack the haus, which in this case happened to be the Country Inn & Suites in Charlotte, NC.

Second, our OCP Nick was a baller with his team, even if the registration opened late due to circumstances outside of his control. He had everything under control and his party planner, Jessica from UGA, put on by far the best RoKS party I've ever attended, and others were in agreement.

Third, Atlanta's own Arcadiy "2 Hottiy" Kantor was the conference manager, trained at International Trainers Congress 2008 in Kiev, Ukraine earlier this year - the highest-quality AIESEC conference for trainers and facilitators in the world. He put together a faci team, including Atlanta's own Thomas Wehner, Katie Sassaman, and Rob Hazelwood that set a whole new standard for the quality of facilitating a regional conference in the United States. As a side to this, no MC member was able to come down to represent at the conference. While I find this unfortunate as I was looking forward to Naoufel gracing us with his humorous and lovable presence, it is nonetheless remarkable due to the success of the conference. In the past, the national staff's presence was largely only effective to police, curb, and often castrate our sessions which we worked so hard on (most memorably Ben James' "The Business of Flirting") and to hand out propaganda for us to read about business development and the exchange programs. This time, we put on an amazing conference completely FUBU.

If that was a little too long for you to read, I'll just put it in math / code form:

Atlanta.rep = ++;
SoCo.rep = ++;

How to Build and Maintain, Yale Style

Our friends from New Haven are building and maintaining the AIESEC reputation on the international level again - check it out. And to keep up with Yale-ys around the world, check out their nomadlife.

So, @ers of GT, what are you doing to build and maintain?

@-love from Cairo,

Maddie

PS. Look out for an update about AIESEC in Egypt coming soon! Or check my blog for more.

The Great Flying-Out

WENALDS.
MENAXLDS.
APXLDS.
EUROXPRO.

All will be rocked like the Perfect Hurricane by the LC come the end of March.

Our own Seancy has returned from a great time at WENALDS in Bamberg, Germany, after carrying his luggage over hill and dale and braving unexpectedly cold water.

I sit with Ben James, Esq. who will take that trip with Firdaus, Denise, and Carleigh in less than three hours to jump on a White Horse to Londontown first, followed by their destination of Tunis, once Carthage, for MENAXLDS. The network has been massaged to produce anticipated good times.

Laleh, Stewardess of the Traineeship Rocketship, will slingshot to Tokyo with the beloved King Himself from up North to make them connections and facilitate more than a little exchange at APXLDS.

My visa for Russia just came in this morning. Naoufel and I will take it to St. Petersburg and EUROXPRO like no other.

I am proud of my LC for keeping strong connections to the global network, exemplifying what AIESEC is really all about. We continue to build a ladder and invite others to climb with us. Where is the top?

Seancy's roll call from Rowdies RoKs

Welcome Xiao...building bridges (and tables)

Yo, yo...yo,yo, yo, Xiao!
Welcome to Atlanta where the Aiesecers play
And we create them exchanges like everyday
Big beats, hit streets, see Aiesecers roamin'
And parties dont stop til' eight in the mornin'

We finally got a chance to meet with our newest trainee in Atlanta, Xiao, from Beijing! She's currently working at Deloitte up around the Perimeter and she finally had some free time to meet and become a part of our AIESEC family.

We had an amazing pot luck dinner in the newest AIESEC house and I'd like to thank everyone for making it an incredible night (and delicious dinner) .

More than anything else, I'd like to thank y'all for making Xiao feel at home with our little family, and showing her the meaning of AIESEC love, southern comfort style. Stay tuned for an update for a "local's tour" with Xiao, and really showing how we do it in the ATL.

ps -many thanks to Kyle for building a dinner table for many more dinners to come...

Leadership Team Retreat Spring 2008

Two years since the first Leadership Team Retreat at this incarnation of our LC, we held our semester-ly Leadership Team Retreat back where it all begins at the Rhea family lakehouse in Leesburg, Alabama, this past weekend. LTR is a time for anyone in the LC who wishes to have ownership over the goals, structure, and culture of our LC to come together and make decisions that determine the course of AIESEC at Georgia Tech for at least the whole semester, and in the case of the Spring, the whole year. It is the time for everyone to pool and focus their energy to springboard into the coming semester.

We arrived late on Friday evening and, despite a few cars getting lost on Highway 411, we managed to comfortably arrange our agenda and prepare for the weekend with a session on our mission and vision both as AIESEC and as a Local Committee. Due to fears of being iced in we brought all our food for the weekend, but thankfully that did not happen and we started Saturday off right at Waffle House. Delicious, yes, but not as crazy as the trips to WaHo at Winter Conference when we danced on tables and screamed out roll calls, eventually getting the waitress to participate. Note for the future: If at all possible, buy food together and cook together, since this is a pretty significant way to come together and experience something as a team. Having our food there already was an admitted damper on the culture of the weekend.

Saturday moved along at a healthy clip as we planned some significant and positive structural and process establishments and changes, especially related to the projects role, which we view as the key to building and maintaining rep in 2008. A major component to staying on task and achieving our goals this weekend was due to an ad-hoc committee structure, when we split the agenda into working groups who were able to focus more on the task at hand and then bring it back to the plenary for approval. This allowed people to take more ownership over the processes we created and have their voice heard more, as ten people focusing on something they chose to go to was more effective than twenty people trying to talk about something at once. In a mere three and a half hours we got through and approved eight sessions of planning, two at a time.

That evening we trucked down to Gadsden, Alabama to eat with my family, which was a pleasant experience for all - except for the probable future surfacing on Facebook of some of my baby pictures. A huge thanks to my parents from the whole LC.

And that evening was one of those times when frustrations and worries came to the front. It was markedly different from the rest of the weekend but it was also a time when we were able to bare our feelings, frustrations, and hopes for the LC together. Such conversations have to happen from time to time, and by the next morning we had all reflected well with ourselves and with each other to reaffirm our direction as an LC.

The weekend's significance was marked by the rise of projects and the commitment to several new coordinator positions. 2008 is certainly here, and it's time for a breakthrough. I guess missing the snow in Atlanta was worth it.