Fellowship Spirit at the PTK Conference

By Stella Akuzie

To promote the feeling of fellowship at the NY Region Phi Theta Kappa Leadership Conference held at Kingsborough Community College, the NY regional officers planned many fun activities that involved people socializing.

One of the activities was an icebreaker called two truths and a lie. In this game people had to find a group with people from other colleges to play the game with. The game required individuals to say three sentences about themselves, two of which were true and one, a lie. The others in the group had to point out which of the three sentences was the lie. So, you sit across an individual who you’ve only seen a few times or even for the first time and you draw a conclusion about them based on looks, dress, façade, maybe tone, dialect etc. The purpose of the game was to get people to relax and get to know something about each other. This proved to be an effective way to make people mingle in a crowd that was originally a bunch of strangers to each other.

So if you find yourself in a gathering with unfamiliar people and you want to relax, you may want to play this game to relax. Who knows you might guess some answers right.

The tour of the Brooklyn Bridge was another fellowship activity. After learning the history of how the five boroughs came to be collectively known as the City of New York and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, we were taken on a tour of the bridge. We all rode on a single bus, where students and advisers from different colleges interacted in continuation of the spirit of fellowship already built through the various activities we partook in together. The tour was both enlightening and refreshing. We were able to locate places on the bridge that we had learned about from the seminar. The tour guide in my tour group was an adviser from Kingsborough Community College.

Phi Theta Kappa honors society encourages fellowship amongst its members. It creates an opportunity for like minds to come together in a free and relaxing environment and interact whether in solving problems or just sharing fun things with each other. Members get a feeling of camaraderie, they share many things in common from attending community college and an interest in education to belonging to the same society and working hard to earn the honor of being in that society. We share a common interest, a fellowship. This fellowship gives us a sense of belonging and affiliation; the feeling of being among which has been shown to contribute to student success.