Who’s the most important person in the room? Maybe the person sitting next to you?

READING TIME: 5 minutes

 

 

 

 

I was about the write this entry solely focused on my experiences with my first year tutorials this year but as I typed the title I realised this is probably important question for all of us, but I digress already.

We have all been to a presentation or a meeting where we don’t know anyone else in the room. For most of us the first challenge is to find somewhere to sit and then we turn our focus to the presenter. If someone comes in later and sits next to us we may glance up, politely acknowledge them, but then we go back listening or reading through the notes we’ve made. Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t be paying attention to the person running session, but watching my students do this over the first few weeks I find myself asking “Have they missed an opportunity?”

The person sitting next to them is in same room as them, so it is highly likely they have some shared purpose. That may be as simple as “surviving accounting and getting as pass” as many of my marketing and management students tell me. However, there may be some much grander plan. The person sitting next to them might be a future colleague, business partner, boss or maybe a lifelong friend. They may also be none of these things but without taking the time to say hi, introduce themselves and have a brief conversation about why they are in the same room this will never become apparent.

One thing I have noticed in recent years is the increased flexibility students have when selecting classes to enrol into. While I’m a huge fans of giving students the opportunity to tailor their study timetable to fit in with their increasingly busy lives, it appears an unintended consequence is a lack of connection between students. Rather than all students from a particular program being assigned to a selection of tutorials and seeing familiar faces in multiple classes each week, it isn’t uncommon for a student to attend 4 different tutorials with new faces in each class. With classes sizes of around 30 students that is 119 new faces that you only see once a week. Establishing a connection with someone and then developing it in these circumstances can be tough, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important.

To try and make the first step in making a connection easier I decided this year to set up groups in my first year accounting tutorials based on the degree students are enrolled in. Given the fact all business students are required to do this subject, when I actually went through this process I found one class had students from 16 different degrees (or more specifically 16 different majors) within one class of 30. There are no specific group tasks to be undertaken in these classes, so the only reason for doing this was to make sure students were sitting next to someone studying the same degree. I explained to the students why I had organised these groups and gave them an opportunity to have a chat amongst themselves. Now I wasn’t expecting every student to make an instant connection but if a few of them found something in common and could support each other through their studies or beyond then I think this is a win.

So back to my original question, while the person at the front of the room is no doubt important (and often that is me), if we don’t take the time to find out who is sitting next to us, and encourage our students to do the same, we all may be missing out on a great opportunity.