By Luis Alarcon, Director of Recruitment & Admissions, Lincoln Land Community College
Like many enrollment professionals, I’ve attended my fair share of conferences, workshops, and leadership institutes. I usually return with a notebook full of ideas, a handful of new professional connections, and a renewed sense of purpose.
But this year, I attended a program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education that was different.
It didn’t give me a checklist; it changed the questions I ask. The conversations challenged many of the assumptions I had carried with me, not because they were wrong, but because they were incomplete.
That realization has stayed with me long after my flight home.
My biggest ideas didn’t come while I was sitting in the classroom …
They came afterward.
Walking back to the hotel. Talking with colleagues over dinner. Reflecting during the flight home.
I found myself asking different questions.
- How can Enrollment Management become more integrated with student success?
- Where are we unintentionally creating barriers for students?
- What assumptions have we accepted simply because “that’s how we’ve always done it”?
- What would I change if I were willing to take a calculated risk?
As part of a case study exercise, I volunteered to play the role of a confused student. During the debrief, I shared that my approach would be to intentionally identify the student’s existing strengths using Tara J. Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth framework. Rather than centering the conversation on what the student lacked, I suggested exploring their linguistic, social, navigational, familial, and other forms of community cultural wealth to better understand how those assets could shape our response.
That moment wasn’t memorable because I referenced a framework I frequently use in my own work. It was memorable because it reminded me that professional development doesn’t ask us to abandon our leadership philosophies; it asks us to evaluate, refine, and strengthen them through dialogue with others.
Those conversations reminded me that the most meaningful ideas often emerge when we connect new learning with the values and frameworks that already guide our work. Those reflections became the catalyst for ideas I couldn’t ignore once I returned home.
Professional Development Should Change More Than Your Calendar
It’s easy to think of professional development as something we attend.
- Register.
- Travel.
- Network.
- Earn a certificate.
- Return to campus and resume business as usual.
I’ve come to believe that’s backward. Professional development should:
- Interrupt our routines.
- Make us slightly uncomfortable.
- Leave us asking whether the way we’ve always done something is actually the best way to do it.
If we return exactly the same leaders we were before attending a program, we haven’t extracted its greatest value.
Learning Creates the Confidence to Act
Another unexpected outcome of the program was confidence.
Professional development has a way of reminding us that our ideas are worth sharing. Our narratives, experiences, and challenges have an impact. After reflecting on previous leadership experiences, that confidence encouraged me to submit conference proposals that I had been considering for months. Those proposals led to opportunities to present nationally at both the RNL National Conference and the NACAC National Conference.
The lesson wasn’t that conferences and classes automatically create opportunities. Rather, they create the confidence to pursue opportunities that may have been sitting just outside our comfort zone.
Sometimes the biggest return on investment isn’t what you learn. It’s what you finally decide to do.
Returning from Harvard, I challenged myself not to simply admire innovative ideas but to implement them.
Some changes will require significant institutional effort. Others can begin with a single conversation, a redesigned process, reframing a campus visit, strengthening collaboration across departments, or simply asking better questions.
Transformation rarely begins with massive organizational change. More often, it begins with one leader choosing to think differently.
The Real Work of Re-Invention
One of my favorite passages comes from William Carlos Williams’ poem “A Sort of a Song”:
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.
Those lines have always reminded me that meaningful change doesn’t begin with grand theories or perfect plans. It begins with paying attention to our students, our colleagues, our campuses, and the everyday experiences that reveal where improvement is needed.
Harvard didn’t give me the answers, but it gave me better questions.
The conversations, case studies, and questions challenged me to look differently at my own work. Not because they provided ready-made solutions, but because they sharpened my ability to see opportunities for change. That’s the true return on investment of professional development. Not simply learning something new. But returning home prepared to do something new.
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