By Maham Nadeem

This year I served in the role of interfaith intern at the Center of Faith and Vocation. Through my experiences I was able to not only gain knowledge about different faith traditions, but also about my own management strengths and weaknesses. Specifically, the majority of my time was spent planning for a campus wide interfaith program. One of the challenges I often face in large group oriented projects such as this is being able to delegate and lead professionally. I have the tendency to take over group work and do the majority of it myself. Keeping this in mind, I made a conscious effort to delegate work and make sure that every person on the council could share ownership of the program. To spearhead this whole concept in the spirit of group collaboration, I instructed everyone to brainstorm two ideas and then partnered council members into groups to chose one idea among all the options. Subsequently, each group presented the concept they chose and all together the council narrowed down on one of the ideas. Collectively, we decided to hold a fair on the Jordan mall with stalls concentrating on music, art, clothing, discussion, and children’s books. We called it “A Fun Fair to Further Faith with Friends.”

To keep this post short and sweet, I will skip the descriptions of all the planning and brainstorming meetings and skip to the day of the fair. All in all, it was a success from my perspective. Best of all, I was leading but not taking over or controlling. Every member of the council was attentive and helpful. Because of that, there was a charm and energy in the crowd that would not have been possible without their active involvement and excitement. Moreover, because we were in such a central location, we were able to attract a lot of people to our event. Ultimately, the most important part of such an effort is ensuring that a targeted audience is able to attend and we were able to accomplish that.