By Kenny Marschner         

One of the most important things about being a leader is believing in yourself and what you do. Even if I’m not the best at something (like juggling or roller skating), I have to be able to have confidence in myself about the possibility of something. That means that I have to believe in myself and believe in what I become. To do so, when you think about yourself, the first questions that you need to answer: Who am I? What do I do? Why am I doing this? What can I be?

Who are you? That’s the priority that we all need to answer first. Without it, we won’t know what our goals are or how to improve ourselves. Leaders know what kind of person they are and use that to determine what direction they take in life.

What do you do? That’s completely up to you. The direction that you take yourself in life is what makes us special. A leader knows what they’re doing and believes in their efforts, but more importantly, can see an end result.

Why are you doing that? Everyone’s motivation for doing something is different. Maybe I want to look cool, or I want money, or I want to help humanity. In order to fully commit to your goals, you need motivation and a reason. You need to see the light at the end of the tunnel. A good leader can envision and believe in why they are doing something and the end result of their efforts. 

And last, but not least, what can you be? When you finish your essay that you have been working on for the past few nights, what will you be? When you successfully open and run your own company, what will you be? A leader knows their starting point to their end point and they understand who they’ll become afterwards.The key to it all is putting all of the steps together.

By Jessica Goel         

When I was a senior in high school, I didn’t really have a concept of what college would be like. That was to be expected, since you never really know what something is going to be like before you try it; however, I was a special case. Both of my parents are immigrants to the United States; my mom came here in 1995 and my dad in 2000. Neither of them went to school in the United States, either, they both had finished high school and subsequently gotten accounting degrees from different community colleges in India. I had been under the impression that it would be a strictly meritocratic academic environment filled with fellow scholars completely divorced from the ostentatious posturing of high schoolers. So you can imagine my shock when I went to Preview and the one thing that was stressed was “make friends and join clubs.” 

Never one to back down from a challenge, and what a challenge it was, telling a self-identifying introvert to “make friends”, as if I could simply conjure them from thin air, I set about trying to find as many clubs for my chosen major as possible. Society of Women Engineers I had heard about at Preview and was already planning on attending their welcome event. Biomedical Engineering Society was tabling at the Reitz Union and I quickly added myself to their ListServ. Then I saw a poster that told me to apply for something called “FLEG.” The word “apply” had me worried, but hey, I had brought a professional dress and shoes to campus, so I marched myself to Turlington to go to the formal meet and greet.

It was here where I became convinced that I wanted to join but was completely unfit for it. Every conversation felt stilted and awkward, I was entirely sure that I had made one of the co-directors of the Outreach committee despise me, and I headed back to my dorm to take off my makeup and have a quick panic attack before my roommate came back from her job. After not going to any other recruitment events and forgetting about FLEG for a week while worrying about my chemistry grade, I remembered to actually submit the application. Typing it up at 7:00 p.m. two days before it was due, I thought to myself “screw it, the worst they can say is no,” took a very poorly lit selfie to act as a headshot, and submitted it.  

Somehow, thanks to the powers that be, I got an email saying that I was selected for an interview. This was where the real panic set in. They wanted me to do an interview? Like, face-to-face? Oh no. A couple days later, I put on the same dress and shoes that I had gone to the meet and greet in, went to the Reitz Union, and waited. This was also the same day that I was meeting with the Outreach chair of SWE and a program director at a middle school to discuss volunteering there, so you can imagine how stressed I was. 

I got to the interview, and who do I see but the Outreach director who I had managed to get to hate me within 10 minutes at the formal meet and greet. One botched interview later, I once again headed back to my dorm to have a panic attack. After not hearing from FLEG for a couple of weeks, I assumed that I wasn’t selected, and planned to move on with my life, fully prepared to just dedicate myself to schoolwork and SWE. That’s when I got the email that there had been a mistake made and that I was in FLEG, and there was a GBM, a Fall Retreat, and a Fall Corporate Formal to go to. 

Naturally this meant that all of my plans needed to do a complete 180, but I was too ecstatic to care. I had actually done it, accomplished something besides the bare minimum of getting into college. If I had been more confident in my abilities, who knows what else I could have done? This ecstatic feeling brought back memories of another time I had been similarly simultaneously happy and rueful, albeit in a completely different context.

By Ethan Glogau          

Thinking about what to write my first leadership post about, I kept thinking about what type of leader I am now, what type of leader I used to be, and what type of leader I aspire to be. By thinking about these different stages of leadership and self, I hope to learn about myself and develop my leadership skills further.

In high school, my leadership goals were very selfish. Oh, I want to be president of this club because it will look good on a resume, I couldn’t care less for the actual organization and goals it wishes to achieve. As you can imagine, this philosophy does not get you very far in life. Without an investment in the success of what you are leading, it is doomed to fail or fade into irrelevance. That was a very childish viewpoint that I have grown out of.

Currently, my leadership journey has taken me to a point of introspection. I don’t know exactly what type of leader I am or want to be. Do I even want to be a leader? Am I put together enough for others to follow me? These questions are very important, and I have been developing my answers in this first year of college. Currently, my leadership strengths lie around leading by example and working the hardest to achieve my goals. I haven’t gone out specifically to get others to follow me. If I don’t show that I should be followed as a leader then any attempt to lead is pointless. For this reason, I have focused on developing myself so that I can be someone to be looked up to and a valuable resource for those around me.

As I grow into the person I want to be, I look towards the qualities of a leader which I strive to embody. Reliability and leading by example are two of the most important leadership characteristics I wish to embody. If you aren’t reliable, you don’t deserve to be followed because you cannot be depended on to work for what you want to achieve. As a leader, you can’t ask those who follow you to do something that you wouldn’t do yourself. For this reason, you must lead by example and show everyone that you have what it takes to do what needs to be done.