Maverick Involvement Team dreams big

It’s never too early, or too late, to achieve your dreams and live your life to the fullest. In a talk with Greg Wilkens, the Associate Director of the Centennial Student Union and student activities, he shared personal stories as well as advice on how to make the most of life.

The “Dreaming Big” talk was a part of a six-week series of leadership talks hosted by the Maverick Involvement Team, all of which are open to the public.

“I encourage people to move from beyond ordinary to extraordinary. So sometimes I believe people limit their dreams because they’ve heard from family or friends as to who they can become, and I’m encouraging people to move outside of that paradigm and thinking about ‘What do you want to do?’, ‘How do you want to leave your mark?’, ‘What will be your legacy?’So, where you are today, what will it be in the next 50 years, and encouraging people to find their passions. What are the things that rock their Birkenstocks, and then put those shoes on and then march to new orders, and to seek out those possibilities,” Wilkins said.

“I encourage people to not allow their past to predict their future. Growing up for me, I wasn’t just poor, I was ‘po,’ I couldn’t afford the ‘or,’ and I didn’t allow that to dictate the person that I wanted to become. It was what I was given at the moment, but it didn’t necessarily have to be the thing that was going to shape my total future and the outcomes that I was going to seek out what I wanted to do, and that was from internships to full-time jobs, world travel, volunteerism, there was gonna be another way to find a solution, and money wasn’t going to be one of the things that was gonna be a roadblock for me,” He said.

Michelle Harvey, the Assistant Director for RSOs, Leadership, and Nontraditional Students, said, “I think students are in a unique place when we’re in college to be thinking about our lives and thinking about what we want our lives to be, and we’re here learning skills in the classroom, but there’s also other skills that aren’t necessarily taught in the classroom; like, how do we dream big? How do we think outside of the ordinary? And, that’s what workshops like this can do for students, is provide another perspective and how can you pair that outside the classroom learning perspective with what you’re learning in the classroom, to then combine yourself into the best you you can be. So I think it helps people be more rounded and find a new perspective.”

Write to Ellie Meschke at eleanor.meschke@my.normandale.edu