1st CVA Visit - Into the Bond

I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen at this Chapter Visitation Assistant visit. All I knew was that it was taking up almost seven hours of my day. So I walked in, just a little bit late, and I was not excited to be there. I’m a busy person, you know. That and I forgot my tea. But I soon forgot all of that because Katie, our CVA, started us going with a huge smile and a ridiculous amount of energy.

We played a game to get everyone going, and then we dove into what we needed to hear as a chapter. It’s almost like when you sit down with a good friend and they tell you everything about yourself that you can’t see, but when they say it, you know it’s true. We each took a personality test and compared it to everyone else’s to find that our chapter has a personality too - one made up of a combination of all of our personalities. And like understanding your own personality, understanding the chapter’s personality can make us more aware of our strengths and our weaknesses in ways that allow us to grow and be better than we were before. And we had lunch and more games and more time to really talk to each other to keep our finger on the pulse of our chapter. How are we doing? What are we doing well? What does it mean to us to be better than we were before? How can we make sure that we put quality over quantity? What are some problems that we have seen and how can we fix them? What are we most afraid of in our chapter and what can we do to mitigate that? Those are the types of questions that will drive our chapter forward and Katie was right there beside us to facilitate the whole discussion. And then Katie lead us through what she called “For Greater Professionals,” a workshop on how the skills that we are learning in Tau Beta Sigma can translate to our professional lives, from getting hired to starting to a job to beyond. It was powerful to have someone, just a few years down the road from us, telling us how much of an impact her TBS experiences had made on her professional career so far.

And through all of this, I felt like the bond between my sisters and I was tightening. It was pulling us in, towards a common goal - serving the bands, yes, but also serving ourselves and serving each other. Maybe we had joined TBS because we wanted to serve the bands, but we had stayed because of the people we met while we were serving and because of the bond that we now share. I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen at the CVA visit, that was for sure. I thought that we would learn about how to make our chapter better - and we did - but what I didn’t expect was how much my sisters and I were drawn together through that process, towards greater bands and into the bond.