President Vince welcomed all to the meeting today. His question of the day for this meeting was “What do you remember most fondly of your time as a child in the summer?” Many great stories were told.
Russ St. Louis, has been made an Honourary member of the Club. A presentation ceremony was held recently at Russ’ new residence at The Village at University Gates. Russ has been a Rotarian for 23 years in both the Kapuskasing Rotary Club, where he served as president in 2005-06 and in Kitchener Rotary. In both clubs her served on numerous committees.
Our speaker today was Ella Mironescu, our former exchange student to Japan and the young adult we sponsored to attend RYLA who told us all about her experiences a this unique Rotary event. Ella was introduced by Tom Mennill.
Ella Mironescu is 19 years old. Back in 2024 she was sponsored by our club to participate in the Rotary Youth Exchange, where she spent a year studying in Japan, learning its culture, language and customs. Since then, she has graduated from Waterloo Collegiate Institute and is preparing to head to the University of Guelph in the fall. Where she will be studying Bio-Medical Sciences in hopes of pursuing her dream of becoming a veterinarian. She loves travelling. And has been travelling abroad since she can remember and even started travelling alone by the age of 15. Because of that, she hopes to one day mix her passion for travelling with her love of animals to practice veterinarian medicine in foreign countries.
Here is an outline of Ella’s presentation with excerpts from it.
What is RYLA?
- Teamwork
- Leadership
- Community
- Service
- Perspective
- Growth
RYLA means Rotary Youth Leadership Academy, it’s an extended weekend where you learn about leadership, but not only just what leadership is but how to apply in your life in different aspects. It was all about teamwork, community and bringing people together, it was about growth - personal growth, growth in your job and aspirations.
Why RYLA?
- Meet New People
- Build Confidence
- Discover Yourself
Why did I choose to attend RYLA and why did I think it was an important thing for me to do? Firstly, I have met a lot of people that had been in RYLA in the past and what I heard was that it was a very eye-opening weekend, where they got to learn a lot more than they expected about leadership. They said it would be an amazing opportunity, so that helped me decide to go. I wanted to meet other young people, and it turns out a lot of people that were there were from KW. Many from Laurier U. and U of Waterloo which I would not have met otherwise. I also met a lot of people that are going to the University of Guelph, which is where I will be going in the fall. They spoke about the Rotaract club there and me interested in checking it our when I get there.
Another thing was the desire to build confidence, being in Japan for a year I force myself to build some level of confidence, but you know you can never stop learning. You can never stop growing so learning from experts on this topic was a really big motivation for me.
I also wanted to discover myself again. When I heard of leadership growing up, I always thought to be a good leader you have to be really loud and extroverted and be the main focus of everything in the room, but in reality you don’t have to be the loudest person in the room to be a good leader. You can also be the quiet person doing something in the background and I wanted to go there to see if they would be able to give me a perspective on what type of leader I am how and I can use my personality to be a leader and flourish in my own aspect
Teamwork
- Communication
- Problem Solving
A lot of things that we did at RYLA were workshopped based. The teamwork ones focused on the aspects of communication and problem solving. We did an exercise called the “Human Knot”, where a small group of us stood together and grabbed each other’s hands and then had to untangle the “knot” while not letting go. At first, we each just started moving on our own and trying to free our own selves, but we came to realize that our own actions impacted others and that to be effective we had to communicate with each other.
We were given several problem-solving scenarios. One I remember was looking at the housing issues for young adults in our city and what we can do to help it. It was interesting that everyone there was so different. Every single person brought different aspects to the conversation. We all have different backgrounds of life and we all had different ways of thinking, so having us all come together and create a solution was a challenging but working tother we came up with a solution none of us would have working just on our won.
Stepping Outside Our Comfort Zones
- Public Speaking
- Networking
- Vulnerability
One of the aspects of stepping outside of our comfort zone dealt with public speaking. For me, personally, I think I’m kind of OK with this and I have done my Rotary Youth Exchange presentation over five times already, so it’s become pretty comfortable for me. However, you could see for other people even just stepping out in front of people, your own age, and in a very informal setting how discomforting it can be. One of our other problem-solving scenarios was to design our dream amusement park and then we had to convince everyone that ours was the best amusement park. This really pushed people out of their comfort zone and made them get more comfortable speaking in front of others making forceful arguments.
The People
- Rylarians
- Facilitators
- Guests
Everyone came from different places. We were all so different but how we came together and influence each other and benefited each of our lives. I’ve learned that just everyone is completely different and this is good.
The facilitators were all experts in their own areas and came to RYKLA as volunteers they were all great and very much appreciated.
Favourite Activities
One of my favourite things at RYLA was called the DISCF evaluation. It’s basically a survey and it tells you what kind of leadership styles you have. It was very interesting to see the different categories the survey put us in. It was one of the main things that I was looking for; going to learning about myself in my leadership style but I was surprised that I was categorized as an “influencer”. I even asked Tessa who’s running the workshop. do you think they messed it up because I’m not like that; no she said, I can see you being influencer. I’m like OK I trust you, very shocking
Another amazing workshop was a drumming workshop. We were in a big circle, and we had the groundskeeper who it’s kind of crazy; he’s basically an Olympian for drumming. He’s was teaching us how to do it. He kept telling me to get back on time, but it was still a very fun experience.
We had different committees and I ended up being on the campfire committee and at first I was kind of worried. I was thinking what kind of game do I play with them? I’m one of the youngest people there; they’re all in their late 20s, what am I going to do with these people? But once we actually got to the campfire, we realized that we didn’t even have to plan that many games. We didn’t have to plan anything because we had all got so close by the end of that time that each other‘s presence was more than enough to make us enjoy this campfire. We had three people bring a guitar so there’s a lot of music. We somehow managed to play a couple games. It was amazing how quickly we became really good friends and that is why the campfire was one of the highlights for me
Leadership Lessons
- Different isn’t bad
- Focus on your strengths
- Value different perspectives
One of the main things I learned from the leadership sessions was that different isn’t wrong, it’s just different. We all have different leadership styles. We all are completely different people, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad just because one person might be more dominant in their leadership. Another thing was focused on was own strengths. We were taught that you shouldn’t focus too much of your negatives and you should focus on what you’re good at and build on them.
One of the important ideas I got out of all the workshops that we did was that if I had just been doing everything alone my outcomes would have been completely different. I would have thought of everything completely differently but having the different perspectives come in and hearing everyone’s different sides and stories of life really made you kind of open your eyes and see maybe there is something different that I can do, that there’s a different pathway I can take.
What I am Bringing Home
- Continuing Rotary through Rotaract
- Challenging myself in new environments
- Listen and learn from others
I do want to continue helping with Rotary. I’m going to Guelph next year and I met a lot of Rotoractors at RYLA and they have convinced me to join the Rotoractors Club at
I want to continue challenging myself in new environments. You can never stop learning, you can never stop growing, and the more you make yourself uncomfortable the more comfortable you become. I want to continue challenging myself and putting myself in these odd situations, I want to listen and learn from others, you can never stop learning There is always more to learn and the way you do that is by listening to other people and to other people‘s perspectives. If it wasn’t for RYLA, I don’t think I would have had as much of an emphasis on this as I will in years to come.
Thank You!
Not only for RYLA, but everything this club has done for me.
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