To Learn and To Lead

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To Learn and To Lead

With the goal of becoming a liberally educated leader who reads, understands and writes effectively, I have grown and learned more than what I thought possible through my Leadership 101 course. This class not only helped me better understand and practice different leadership skills but also improve my writing. I have learned here how to write and express myself, how to think for myself, and how to find the answers to the things that I don’t know. Through my experiences in this class, I have gained the knowledge and confidence I need to make progress toward my life and career goals.

      When I first started the class, I thought I was going to spend the next 3 months reading novels, discussing them and then writing about them. However, I quickly found out that that there was so much more to it. I love that the class used teams and team work on more than one occasion. It helped me learn how to work effectively as a member of a team, as well as express my own idea as a future leader. I communicated my ideas to the group while trying to balance the ideas of others so the group could come to an agreement decision. I remember the first time we were required to take the quiz on historian William Cronon’s essay “Only Connect: The Goals of a Liberal Education” as a group, I didn’t like the idea because I thought there would be conflicts arising from people having lots of opinions. However, after the first quiz discussion together, I found it very useful to learn from other members’ ideas I didn’t recognize through my own reading. Moreover, doing group projects helped me improve my public speaking skills. I was shy and afraid to say what I thought at first, but expressing my own ideas to others in the group encouraged me to conquer the fear of public speaking. Obviously, this can benefit me no matter what career I decide to go into, because the ability to talk in front of people, take control of a situation and still remain collegial is a valuable asset.

    To be quite honest, through earlier my academic life, writing has never been my favorite subject. And it is also challenging to write at the college level, which means I have to step out of the five-paragraph essay form that constricted my ideas for so long in high school. However, throughout this course, I have learned to open my mind and express my ideas in a more reflexive way. Moreover, the essay assignments in this class also have greatly sharpened my critical analysis skills. When I look at my first draft for the essay on E. L. Doctorow’s The March, I realize it was bland and too short. I just restated facts without formulating an actual thesis and providing supportive evidence. Throughout the semester, with the help of my professor and helpful advice from my classmates, I have learned to come up with a main claim and continuously ask “why?” on many different levels. I was able to shed some bad writing habits and write a paper with stronger ideas and better organization.

      With the goal of becoming a future leader who “thinks deeply, lives honorably and engage the intellectual and social challenges of her time” (the mission statement of Agnes Scott College), I believe that I have achieved what I was looking for after taking this Leadership 101 course. I am very grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this growing and learning community. Even though I was sometimes faced with deadlines, rules and assignments that I could not work around, I found that all of these responsibilities have made me realize that I can definitely take the next step forward in my academic career. Each new experience has helped me continue to grow as a future leader. Harvey S. Firestone once said, “The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.” And I believe this!

 

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