 | Graduate student Bill Montanaro gets ready to swing as his MBA classmates (l-r) Jennifer Doherty, Thomas King, and Elodie Marteau (partially hidden) await their turn on one element of the new Challenge Course.
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Leadership Center offers a ‘challenging’ courseWith his right foot looped in the rope, URI MBA student Bill Montanaro of Narragansett has to make a strategic decision. How does this modern-day Tarzan swing on the rope and land on a 3-foot-by-3-foot platform 15 feet away without knocking over a dozen or more of his classmates huddled there? If he falls short of the platform and into the fictitious raging river, he must be rescued.
That’s the challenge. Or rather that’s the Nitro Crossing, just one of 15 elements in URI’s new Challenge Course, located in the woods just off Old North Road on the edge of the Kingston campus.
The course, funded in large part by URI’s Student Senate, is designed to build such leadership skills as how to communicate clearly, solve problems, and remain calm, especially when it looks like someone twice your size is about to bowl you over.
“It’s physical and it’s mental,” agrees Steve Simo of URI’s Center for Student Leadership Development who coordinates the challenge course. “It’s experiential education. Students are challenged to work together to create a vision, a mission.
The course is modeled after the successful Project Adventure, an international program with 30-plus years of experiential education. The course’s elements are rated fortheir difficulty much like a ski course. The perceived risk of injury is much higher than the reality, however.
Students who help facilitate the course come from diverse areas of University life, including the ROTC program, the Women’s Center, the Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender organization, as well as students enrolled in the 18-credit interdisciplinary minor in leadership studies which combines academics with experiential learning.
Student groups including members of URI’s Union Board, Coffeehouse, Diversity House, Student Senate, the men’s soccer team and its coaches have already taken the challenge.
All incoming MBA students, who will spend the one-year program working together as a team on a wide variety of projects, took the challenge before school began this fall. It was an opportunity for them to get acquainted wiggling through tires, falling in hopes that their new classmates will catch them, and swinging in the air.
“There was a time when I was very skeptical as to whether or not we would be able to fit everyone on that little platform,” says Montanaro.
By Jan Wenzel
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