Level Up 2026

Presenter: Dani Chavarria

Summary: Homebuying 101 is an informative and engaging session designed to prepare students for the general process of purchasing a home in the state of Wisconsin. This workshop provides a clear overview of what it takes to become a homeowner, from financial preparation to closing day, while offering practical insights and local resources to help attendees feel confident about navigating the Wisconsin real estate market.

The session will begin by outlining the key stages of the homebuying journey: assessing financial readiness, getting pre-approved for a mortgage, searching for homes, making an offer, completing inspections, and finalizing the purchase. Special attention will be given to Wisconsin-specific factors such as local housing trends, first-time homebuyer assistance programs, and state-specific legal or procedural steps buyers should be aware of.

Students will also gain an understanding of how to evaluate affordability, improve credit, and explore different loan options, including FHA, VA, and conventional mortgages. The workshop will break down real-world examples to help participants understand how down payments, interest rates, and closing costs impact their purchase.

Beyond the basics, Homebuying 101 will highlight the importance of building a strong support team—real estate agents, lenders, inspectors, and title companies—and explain how each professional contributes to a smooth transaction. The session will close with practical tips on long-term homeownership readiness, such as maintaining property value, budgeting for upkeep, and planning for future equity growth.

Presenters: Kai Cattaneo, Nick Brundage

Summary: In this session, we’ll share the real story behind building our marketing company, BrandScale, and the many business ventures that led us here. Over the past decade, we’ve started and grown multiple companies — some that thrived and others that failed — each teaching us something crucial about what it really takes to build something sustainable.

How to Build a Real Business isn’t about overnight success stories or startup buzzwords. It’s about the small, day-to-day decisions that quietly determine whether your idea turns into a business — or burns out. We’ll talk honestly about what we got wrong, what we learned from those missteps, and how we began thinking long-term instead of chasing quick wins.

While our stories come from entrepreneurship, the lessons apply across any career path. Whether you’re deciding between studying for an exam or working on your side hustle, choosing between stability or risk, or figuring out how to make decisions that future-you will thank you for — this talk is designed to give you perspective and practical tools.

Our goal is to help students understand that building a “real business” — or a real career — comes down to the same thing: consistently making intentional choices that align with who you want to become.

Presenter: Wendy Ledesma

Summary: Leadership is not reserved for CEOs, politicians, or those with formal titles—it is a set of skills and mindsets that can be cultivated by anyone, in any field. Sparking Your Leadership Potential is an interactive workshop designed to help undergraduate students discover and develop their own leadership capacity, no matter their major or career goals.

Led by a physician executive with firsthand experience leading teams in high-stakes healthcare settings, this session introduces students to leadership as a practical, everyday skill. Drawing from medicine, business, and real-world examples, the workshop emphasizes that leadership is about influence, adaptability, and the ability to mobilize others toward a shared vision. Students will see how leadership principles translate across disciplines—from engineering to business, education to the arts—and will gain tools they can use immediately in their academic, professional, and personal lives.

The workshop blends short presentations, real-world case stories, and interactive exercises that encourage reflection and participation. Students will learn how to identify their own leadership style, practice communication strategies that inspire collaboration, and understand how to navigate challenges with resilience. Rather than presenting leadership as abstract theory, this session grounds it in relatable, tangible tactics that empower students to step up in group projects, campus organizations, and eventually their careers.

Learning Goals

By the end of the workshop, students will be able to:

• Define Leadership Broadly – Recognize that leadership is not confined to positional authority but is about influence, initiative, and creating positive change in any context.
• Identify Personal Strengths – Reflect on their own values, skills, and communication styles to better understand the unique strengths they bring to leadership situations.
• Practice Key Tactics – Explore practical techniques for motivating others, resolving conflict, and building trust across diverse groups.
• Develop Adaptability – Learn how to lead in uncertain or high-pressure situations by embracing flexibility, resilience, and problem-solving.
• Apply Skills Across Fields – Understand how leadership competencies apply in a variety of careers and how they can be tailored to different professional and personal settings.

This workshop is designed to be inclusive, accessible, and relevant to students from all majors. Whether a participant is preparing for a career in business, healthcare, the arts, or public service, the skills discussed will equip them to be more effective collaborators, team members, and future leaders.

Presenters: Kate McCleary

Summary: At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, many students, staff, and faculty regularly navigate cultural boundaries through practices like code-switching, which involves shifting language, behavior, or presentation to align with different social or cultural norms. While this can be a source of stress and identity conflict, it also builds valuable skills in cultural awareness, adaptability, and communication. These same skills are essential when engaging across international cultures, where understanding and responding to unfamiliar norms is key to respectful and effective interaction.

In this workshop, we will discuss how domestic experiences with cultural negotiation prepare students to study, live, and work abroad with greater empathy and confidence, recognizing that cultural fluency begins here at UW-Madison. We will use application prompts from the Fulbright teaching and research scholarship and the Peace Corps applications to identify ways that students can leverage their lived experiences in applying for study abroad, national, and international awards. We seek to introduce students to post-graduate opportunities to study, teach, and work abroad through Fulbright, Peace Corps, and beyond.

Learning goals and outcomes:

• Identify personal experiences of navigating cultural differences and reflect on how these experiences have shaped participants’ communication and adaptability skills.
• Draw connections between domestic and international cultural navigation, understanding how skills developed through code-switching can support effective engagement in global contexts.
• Introduce students to post-graduate opportunities supported by UW-Madison, such as the Fulbright Awards (teaching/research) and Peace Corps. We will also introduce students to other post-graduate opportunities such as the Marshall Scholarship, Gates Cambridge Scholarship, the Rhodes Scholarship, and teaching opportunities abroad.

Presenters: Maxwell Love

Summary: This workshop will help students identify their “story of self,” a practice in the Ganz Model of Social Change that emphasizes the importance of leadership and storytelling. We will help attendees through a framework of “challenge, choice, outcome” and “self, us, now” in order to get them more in touch with why they do the work they do. There will also be a short discussion on how to turn this work into a full-fledged career in organizing, politics, and social movements.

Presenters: Jennifer Unitan, Mo O’Connor

Summary: Level Up learning outcomes addressed in this workshop: Providing space for scholars to explore post-graduation opportunities and available resources, as well as the importance of incorporating students’ identities, leadership qualities and academic excellence into their future plans.

Desired learning goal: Students will learn the different components of a graduate school application, how to prepare to apply, to present each component accurately and to their best advantage, and to feel confident that applying to graduate school is an achievable goal.

We will review the following components of a graduate school application, provide insight into what reviewers may be looking for, provide strategies for building a strong application, and offer examples to illustrate our points. We will also discuss the benefits of researching requirements ahead of time to allow for building a compelling application package.

1. Preparing to apply
2. Look for events offered by the program
3. Prerequisites
4. General basic application information
5. Statement of purpose
6. Letters of recommendation
7. Resume
8. Transcripts
9. Additional Essays or supplemental applications
10. Standardized tests
11. Review, proofread

Presenter: José Ramirez

Summary: This will be a dialogue based session that will center on self-reflection and discussion with student leaders about the development and use of their support systems to thrive while and post the UW-Madison undergraduate experience.

Learning Goals:

• Reflect on one’s current support system
• Identify additional support system folks (career/grad school/activities)
• Understand the importance of informational interviews

Presenter: Nola Pastor

Summary: This session will ask students to reflect on how communities often respond to sexual and relationship violence, including community and survivor needs for healing. It will also address the language of “justice” and “accountability” and what these words can mean in formal systems, community thinking, and individual survivor experiences. We will talk about how to center survivors in responding to harm by honoring boundaries, deconstructing assumptions about safety and cancel culture, and following the lead of those who have been most impacted. This will also include learning skills for having individual accountability conversations with people who have caused harm or have been accused of causing harm, as well as how organizations can respond to allegations and situations of violence in values-aligned ways that promote healing and transformation. This means problematizing the tendency to act in ways that protect an individual’s or organization’s reputation, instead of working authentically to address root causes of harm and support individuals in behavior change.

Learning goals:

• Reflect on how your own and other communities often respond to sexual and relationship violence
• Learn best practices for centering survivors in responding to violence
• Learn options for transformative interpersonal accountability conversations and organizational accountability practices

Presenter: Lydia Odegard

Summary: Whether you developed your language skills at home, abroad, or in an educational setting, learn how multilingualism is an asset to a career in any field. In this session, Lydia Odegard, Language Directions Specialist at the Language Institute, will discuss data from employers about the demand for language skills across industries. You’ll also learn about how transferable skills – like communication, flexibility, problem solving, and teamwork – relate to multilingualism, and why that matters for your career.

By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:

• Understand and articulate the demand for language skills in the U.S. workforce across industries
• Draw connections between language abilities and transferable skills, and articulate how examples from their own language learning experiences relate to transferable skills employers need
• Identify resources to further reflect on the connection between language skills and career pathways

Presenter: Alex Hopp

Summary: As a student in the (ex) DDEEA, it will come as no surprise to you that we are living in a time of unprecedented change. In these moments of uncertainty, the history of our programs informs our path forward. This session will consider the recent past, helping to contextualize how and why we’ve arrived in the current moment before providing a space for reflection and discussion about the current direction of UW-Madison and our investment (or disinvestment) in that change