When you’re an engineering student at RPI, complaining about the Archer Center is almost a degree requirement. It’s certainly understandable; when you’re spending over $60 per hour to construct something out of spaghetti and masking tape, you start to think that the Archer Center is the biggest waste of money at RPI.
For years, I, too, hated the fact that I would have to take the professional development classes that are a mandatory part of my major and scoffed at any PD material I saw. Lately, however, I have come to realize that the Archer Center provides a valuable service on campus, and I have been trying to convince people that they should actually listen to the material being presented in the class.
As an Eagle Scout and a former editor in chief of this newspaper, I have had my share of leadership, management, and teamwork experiences. I had to sit through classes that presented the exact same material that was being taught in PD classes, and, of course, scoffed at them at the time, too. I certainly still made mistakes after these classes, and so in PD I remember sitting and thinking, “This is a waste of my time; I learned this that time I screwed up dealing with ...”
These same complaints, however, are what made me realize that the professional development classes offered by the Archer Center are actually valuable. Buried under stuff like, well, building spaghetti structures, is legitimate material that can be a real boon to people who actually listen to it. Most of the problems I had in learning how to criticize, discipline, and fire people on my teams over the years resulted in the same lessons that the Archer Center was teaching.
I cannot say, nor will I try to say, that everything the Archer Center covers in their classes is valuable and noteworthy. Like any other human resources class, PD classes here are frequently full of exercises that pretend to be valuable and turn out to be a waste of time. The instructors at the Archer Center are human resources people, though, and it is no surprise that they are trying to present the material in the way that they are familiar with. They can hardly be blamed for teaching what they know.
One of the things I remember most clearly from PD3 was the corporate guests and how every one of them made a point of saying that they wished their undergraduate curriculum had taught this kind of material or that they wished they had paid attention to it. I thought at the time that the instructors must have asked them to say that, but now I realize that it is true. Buried in the ridiculous activities and topics are real gems of wisdom, and those who have not yet taken their professional development classes would be well-served to actually listen and try to find them so that they can avoid learning the material in the future by making ignorant mistakes.
