OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Choosing an Organization Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Identify an organization and situation you want to study over the remainder of the course.
2. Describe the organization and the situation

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Name and describe your organization.

The organization that I will be discussing in this case study is a student-operated sub-section

of my former university’s public health and student wellness offices known as the,

“Sexperts”. This organization consisted of a mixture of volunteers and paid employees, all

from the university’s student body. The purpose and function of the organization was to

provide the student body with access to comprehensive sexual education programs, as well as

access to resources such as contraceptives, free testing sites, and pop-up clinics. The

subsection of this organization being featured most prominently in the case study will be the

educational division, which runs a variety of educational workshops around campus and in in

partnership with additional associations such as residency halls, sororities and fraternities,

and other student life organizations. Overall, this organization is respected and well-liked

with campus administration and has even received various forms of recognition for the

quality of their educational workshops.

2) Describe your role in the organization (it can be an internal or external role).

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 During my first semester at The University of Connecticut as a transfer student, I decided to

get involved in this organization as a student volunteer in the educational division. In this

role, I spent the first half of the semester attending various trainings and weekly team

meetings, auditing the workshops that they hosted, and doing mock-workshops in front of

other members of the organization.

3) Describe the situation, including information you think the will help the reader
understand the most important elements of the situation. (This will require
selectivity: part of the art of case writing is separating the essential facts from the
mass of information that might be included).

The situation of interest is an interaction that occurred at a debriefing meeting hosted

directly after a workshop that was conducted, and the series of events that followed. At

this meeting, the student employee in charge of the educational division started off by

asking all everyone what they thought went well during the workshop, as well as what

they thought could be improved. When my turn to speak came, I highlighted my favorite

aspects of the workshop before providing a suggestion on what I thought could be

improved. Mid-way through my sentence, the student running the meeting cut me off,

stating, “We weren’t looking for suggestions from new people – Maybe wait until you’ve

run a workshop to say anything”. This comment left me feeling undervalued and

defensive. Shortly after, I was pulled aside by our faculty advisor who had heard about

that interaction and wanted to run a mediation session between myself and the student

lead. The session resulted in my decision to leave the organization due to a perceived

incompatibility between how I wished to be treated as a team member and the nature of

power dynamics within the group. In the weeks following my departure, three other

newly recruited members had also decided to step away from the organization.
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