Personal Growth Days

The Spirit Life program at Ottawa University is designed to allow every student to pause, reflect, and explore their own spirituality and assess their own personal faith pilgrimage. By fostering the integration of faith, learning, and living to aid in the pursuit of personal lives of significance, and consistent with its mission, heritage and identity, the Christian faith perspective will be presented in a setting and manner that allows students to freely accept or reject it, but not ignore it. Confident in the belief that all truth is of God, the Spirit Life program’s learning opportunities will occur in an atmosphere of free and open inquiry where all aspects of knowledge will be explored.

FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS: The Bible and Culture

The Bible and Culture track offers students an opportunity to discern and learn from parallels and metanarratives from culture, pop culture, and contemporary occurrences with those of the Bible. Students will learn that the pursuit of faith or a spirit life cannot occur in a vacuum, and because we all exist in various levels of the global community, basic cultural exegesis is necessary.

SOPHOMORES: World Religions

In this track, students will learn what constitutes a religion, and survey the major religions of the world. The historical development, major texts, key figures, beliefs, rituals, practices, and contemporary tends of the religions will be presented in such a manner as to aid the students’ understanding and preparation to function and succeed in an increasingly diverse present and future world.

JUNIORS: Exploring Your Creative Spirit

Your creativity is more than a hobby. It is an important part of who you are that is necessary for success in the global marketplace. In this track you will examine the nature of creativity, its barriers, and the role it plays in your future work and career.

SENIORS: Paradigms, Perspectives and Purpose

Designed for seniors, Paradigms, Perspectives and Purpose is a philosophical track designed to provoke higher order cognition of faith by engaging in presuppositional thinking, worldviews and apologetics.

Students attend skill development workshops. These workshops are virtually identical to those offered in professional development training programs by corporations and non-profit organizations. They are aimed at honing and shaping student competencies in areas such as public speaking, project management, leadership, writing for business, negotiations, personal finance, how to persuade, personal selling, research, conflict management, listening, group facilitation, and many more. These are skills that employers of all types prize and will set OU students apart as work-ready graduates when it is time to land that first job. In addition, each student will be encouraged to develop conversational capability in at least one additional language.

Personal Growth Days are also designed to offer an array of service learning, shadowing and other experiential learning and service opportunities within teams and as individuals. OU grads will undoubtedly point to these experiences as many of their most impactful “Aha!” moments in their educational careers.

To see a listing of current workshop offerings, click here.