Join us for the first summer camp experience designed with engineers in mind.
The Happy Engineer is launching summer camp for grown-ups. And we’re building it for engineers. Get out of your office and join us for a long weekend of fun, adventure, and learning.
Our Summer Camp will offer you all the fun of a traditional camp experience including a ropes course, hiking trails, water sports, and art activities. And we’ll mix in daily workshops that use the latest research from Positive Psychology to teach you keys to success at work and in life. We’ll challenge you to think in new ways about yourself and what’s possible for your career. And then you’ll spend your evenings around the campfire, stargazing, philosophizing with fellow campers, and of course, eating s’mores.
The Summer Camp curriculum is designed to help you build your career with clarity and purpose.
Think of it as a self-improvement hackathon. We’re hacking four lines of code this summer:
1. Existential career questions
Are you asking yourself big life questions?
Perhaps you’re looking for deeper meaning at work.
Maybe you’re contemplating career paths.
Maybe you’re even contemplating a career change.
Mark Franklin, Founder of Career Cycles will be joining us on Thursday night to facilitate an interactive career planning group discovery experience. Over the course of the evening you’ll develop your own personal career sketch and career statement that will give you renewed clarity of the path ahead. Whether you love your job or are looking for a change, this workshop will help you envision possibilities for your career.
2. Lasting personal growth
Do you need to break out of a bad habit or attitude?
Are stresses from work or life weighing you down?
Are you sometimes shy or uncomfortable at work?
Is your inner voice skewed negative and way too damn loud?
Helen Naoumov is the Manager of Learning and Development at Infrastructure Ontario. She is coming up to camp with workshops and activities that facilitate the kind of deep personal learning that can only come from stepping outside of your comfort zone. She’s also an engineering-physicist, so expect her workshops to appeal to your head as well as your guts.
You’ll also participate in Professor Robin Sacks’ Happy Engineer workshops that use the latest research from positive psychology to help you focus on your goals, leverage your strengths and generate the courage to make real, lasting self-improvements.
3. People skills, especially teams
Do you want to improve your team skills?
Do you feel like you often miscommunicate your ideas?
Do you hold back during team meetings?
Is dealing with people difficult for you?
Sonia Sennik’s workshops will demonstrate the key components to synergistic teamwork. Combining lessons from both her career as a Project Manager at Hatch and as the silver-medal winning Coach of the Ontario provincial women’s rugby team, Sonia will help you identify and break through your own roadblocks to trust, openness and effective communication. Whether you’re a master team-player who could use some fine tuning on your team skills or you need a total overhaul because dealing with others is proving difficult, Sonia’s workshops will give you new hard skills to take back to the office.
4. Your leadership story
How can you make sure that the lessons from camp translate to the real world?
We’ve invited Katie Underwood, Associate Editor at Chatelaine Magazine, to teach us about the power of story. A good story can inspire and enliven you, fortify your values and give you hope, clarity and direction. Katie’s workshop will guide you through a writing process that uses meaning-making and narrative as fuel for lasting personal development. There will be time each day for quiet reflection and journaling so that you can preserve the experiences and lessons of summer camp and return to them for clarity and motivation when you’re back at your desk.
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See what we’ve done… We’ve convened some of Toronto’s best people-developers to facilitate workshops that will help you hack into your software to increase your efficiency and fix bugs that hold you back. You’ll come home from camp You 2.0.
And in between workshops you’ll be trying new things like paddle boarding or kayaking, taking risks on the ropes course, stretching your mind and muscles with lakeside yoga, painting, having fun with new like-minded people and bathing your soul in the forest. In other words we’re concocting your camp days to ensure that you have surges of dopamine, adrenaline, GABA, endorphins, more dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin – Yup, we’re serving up a neurochemical-cocktail of happiness from morning to midnight to go along with an incredible array of professional growth workshops from some of Toronto’s best people developers, most of whom are engineers themselves.
Our mission:
You will return home from camp with improved people skills, sharpened career clarity, increased self-confidence and feeling amazing.
A typical day up at camp
7:00am Early morning yoga, hike, or country road run - optional of course
8:00am Breakfast in the dining hall overlooking the lake
9:00am Workshop: The building blocks of happiness at work. Leveraging your strengths and values to uncover day-to-day meaning and fulfilment.
10:30am Experiential learning: This is your brain on learning - the neurobiological foundations of self-improvement as seen from 100 feet off-shore - canoeing, kayaking, paddle boarding - with instruction for all levels.
12:00pm Lunch
1:30pm Experiential learning: Three hard truths about teamwork that you can only discover on a ropes course.
3:30pm Afternoon snack with creativity-boosting, engineer-specific arts & crafts.
4:30pm Experiential learning: Into the woods - What nature can teach us about subtle communication, self-awareness and success.
6:30pm Free time
7:00pm Dinner
8:00pm Evening program: Engineering the good life - lessons from philosophy, psychology and history.
10:00pm Campfire under the stars, with s'mores of course.
Rates
$995/person - Single room
$525/PERSON - SHARED ROOM
This fee includes single or double occupancy, hotel-style accommodation at Geneva Park Lodge from June 22 to 25, all meals and snacks from Thursday night dinner through Sunday lunch, all camp activities (water sports, ropes course etc.), and daily professional development workshops.
This rate does not include transportation to the site. If enough campers are interested, we will arrange a bus. We will also facilitate ride-sharing.
Do not let the cost of this summer camp keep you from attending. If you want to come but don’t have that kind of money (yet) contact us and we’ll work it out. The Happy Engineer uses the Pay It Forward For Optimal Attendance System: You come now at our lowest possible price and promise to pay the rest—eventually, when you can afford to—into a scholarship fund to help other young engineers attend. No interest. No deadline. This is a trust-based agreement grounded on our certainty that you’ll be excited to contribute to someone else’s summer camp, as soon as you can.
Please contact us if you have questions. We’ll get you up to camp this summer.
About Geneva Park
Built on a peninsula on Lake Couchiching, Geneva Park is 150 acres nestled in extraordinary natural surroundings. Located only 90 minutes from Toronto, the site offers a full range of activities including tennis, horseshoe pits, beach volleyball, canoeing, windsurfing, kayaking, paddleboats, sailboats, hiking trails and more. Enjoy your meals from the cathedral ceiling lounge overlooking the lake. Accommodations in the Geneva Lodge are hotel style (minus the tv!). Description courtesy of Geneva Park, Simcoe Muskoka.