Miles Sisk is a sophomore at the University of Oregon with an idea. That idea is to connect a web of students with different talents that are willing to teach others. He calls it TalentShare.
“It connects students who have particular skills, talents, abilities that they’ve acquired throughout their life who can then volunteer to teach students how to do those things,” said Sisk.
What Sisk is trying to organize is a club. He wants to have a website and possibly a board up at the EMU that lists students with different skills and talents. That way TalentShare would connect students who want to learn a skill to the person on the board who is volunteering to teach it for free.
The board and the website would make it so that students can reap the benefits of TalentShare without making any sort of commitment to the organization. There will be volunteers who manage the club, but no weekly meetings. Anyone can use it.
“You can do more than just come here and take some classes and get your degree, but you can come here and pick up skills that you never even thought were possible,” said Sisk.
Sisk has been getting the word out about his program by talking to individual students at Introducktion. He hopes to get a table at the Week of Welcome and plans on advertising it on Facebook and other social media outlets.
The program also aims to bring students out of their shells so that they can meet new people. It is designed to bring the entire UO community together.
“It can be hard to get outside of your own little group, and I think that it provides a really unique opportunity to give students a specific reason to be reaching out and meeting new people and interacting with people,” said Althea Seloover who is helping Sisk with TalentShare.
Sisk does not believe that TalentShare will be an officially recognized club by the ASUO for a while, but he has already found volunteers to teach knitting as well as the piano. Sisk and Seloover have been reaching out to businesses around town to get funding for expenses that the club may incur such as the website and the board in the EMU.
The club has not taken lift-off quite yet, but with any luck there will be students teaching students sooner rather than later.
“I’m in the process of figuring out what talentshare is and what it can be,” said Sisk.