Georgetown will host the 20th annual National Jesuit Student Leadership Conference, an annual meeting of student leaders from the 28 Jesuit universities in the United States, next summer.
The five-day event will last from July 19 to 23, 2017 and will include keynote speeches, breakout sessions and presentations from dozens of Jesuit university students.
The conference is sponsored by the Jesuit Association of Student Personnel Administrators, and has been occurring annually since 1997.
This will be Georgetown’s first time hosting the conference. In 2013, Georgetown students placed a bid to host the 2015 NJSLC, but JASPA chose Canisius College in Buffalo, NY instead.
As the host university in 2017, Georgetown will design an overarching theme and plan out the conference itself, including social programming, catering and housing for the estimated 400 attendees.
Connor Maytnier (COL ’17), Will Simons (COL ’16) and Angela Bai (COL ’17) drafted a forty-page proposal last fall and submitted the plan to JASPA. The hosting proposal included a projected budget, a planned schedule and letters of reference from a number of top university administrators.
After JASPA awarded the bid to Georgetown, three students were selected to co-chair the planning committee: Tashi De Sousa (NHS ’17), Adri Corriveau (SFS ’19) and Maytnier.
This past semester, the three co-chairs accepted applications for other committee members to form the planning committee of 12 students who will begin work this summer.
According to Maytnier, however, the bulk of the organizing and marketing for the conference will happen over the course of the 2016-2017 academic year.
“We’re going to hit the ground running in the fall,” Maytnier said. “It’s a lot of things, big picture: it’s housing, it’s dining, and it’s overall programming for over 400 people. It’s a lot of advanced work so far out.”
According to Maytnier, student leaders at Jesuit universities share challenges with Georgetown student leaders that make an exchange of ideas particularly beneficial.
Maytnier said the NJSLC offers an important opportunity for Georgetown students to learn from their Jesuit peers.
“These are students coming from schools that have the same core values, the same guiding principles,” Maytnier said. “Just the way we see our different offices and departments across campus trying to live out Jesuit values and incorporate that into their mission and what they’re trying to do, the leaders of the other twenty-seven [Jesuit universities] are experiencing that very similarly.”
