{"id":138170,"date":"2019-10-09T10:40:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-09T16:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/?p=138170"},"modified":"2022-03-16T10:46:47","modified_gmt":"2022-03-16T16:46:47","slug":"growth-through-leadership-will-riden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/?p=138170","title":{"rendered":"Growth through Leadership | Will Riden"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This month we\u2019re highlighting a 2019 UCCS graduate reflecting on his time with Dining and Hospitality Services (DHS) and at UCCS in general: Will Riden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Riden, one of the first student employees following UCCS\u2019s establishment of our own dining and hospitality services department, has been influential in shaping the program. But his journey began much earlier than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI graduated high school in California, so that\u2019s the easiest way to answer where I\u2019m from,\u201d says Riden when asked how he came to UCCS. In reality, as a military child he\u2019s called five different states \u2013 Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado and Wyoming \u2013 home over his pre-college years. Seven of those 18 years were spent in Colorado Springs, so UCCS \u201cjust felt like the right choice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The summer before starting at UCCS, Riden applied for a job, and was subsequently hired, in the newly-established DHS department on campus. When reflecting on his time at UCCS, Riden states that his student employment has been one of the most influential structures for his personal development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn high school, I didn\u2019t do anything. I did the bare minimum in my classes to not get yelled at by my parents, I did nothing extracurricular, I wasn\u2019t at all outgoing. I would just come home and play video games every day,\u201d says Riden. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It helped living on campus and being immersed in the college life, but Riden attributes his personal growth to his job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On his changes from high school to college, Riden says, \u201cthe change in how I both present myself and how I interact with people around me from August of 2014 to now is\u2026I mean, let me put it this way: the first couple of summers I went home my parents were like \u201cWho are you? You\u2019re not the kid we sent off to college anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Riden started his time with DHS at the bottom of the totem pole. Over time, he worked his way up to one of two of the highest student positions in DHS. As the Student Director of Residential Dining and Catering, Riden was primarily responsible for overseeing student staff, and with DHS being the largest employer of students on campus, this was no small feat. His position included conducting interviews, making hiring decisions, onboarding new employees, conducting orientations, extensive paperwork, and working with student management teams to ensure the entire operation was run smoothly. He says he found a particular knack for developing students in his role and trying to ensure that student employees under him left their jobs with as many relevant skills as they could.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m eternally grateful for the opportunity, because outside of UCCS there would be no way I would be in a role with a similar level of responsibility in such a short amount of time,\u201d says Riden of his job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Riden even goes so far to say that some of the skills he learned in his position taught him things the classroom couldn\u2019t. As a student of UCCS, Riden started in the Bachelor of Innovation program pursuing game design and development with business as a cross-discipline core, but three years into it, he wasn\u2019t feeling as inspired with that and felt more drawn to the business courses he was taking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In May 2019, Riden graduated with his Bachelor of Innovation in Business Administration with a cross-discipline core in engineering and with minors in both game design and development and computer science (he describes figuring out how to word all of that on his graduation announcements as \u201ca nightmare.\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time of the interview, Riden was moving to Denver in a month to start a job at a software company that he had been offered back in November. A career that combines technology and business was exactly what he was looking for, so he couldn\u2019t have been more excited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His biggest takeaway from his time at UCCS: make mistakes. On this, Riden had to offer: \u201cIt\u2019s kind of counterintuitive to everything that we hear beforehand, but there\u2019s only so much you can learn from doing things right. You can\u2019t always look back and figure out what factors contributed to success or what worked well, but it\u2019s easier to look back and concretely identify what went wrong and where to improve.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month we\u2019re highlighting a 2019 UCCS graduate reflecting on his time with Dining and Hospitality Services (DHS) and at UCCS in general: Will Riden. (More)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":138172,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[40,432,60],"class_list":["post-138170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all","tag-college-of-business","tag-faces-of-uccs","tag-student-success"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Will-Riden-Featured.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1mBpJ-zWy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=138170"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138175,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138170\/revisions\/138175"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/138172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=138170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=138170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=138170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}