Why Leadership?

Ever since I was in second grade, I have been learning about leadership. At a young age, I attended leadership training camps in hopes of making close friends. I realized later in life that I gained much more from those experiences than I would have ever imagined. Leadership is one of my passions and I could talk about it for hours; I even get fired up when listening to a lecture or reading a book on leadership. When I heard that Ohio State offered a Leadership Studies minor, there was no doubt it my mind that I wouldn’t pursue it immediately. Within the minor, this specific course appealed to me because of the title, “Team and Organizational Leadership”.

Throughout our lives we are always involved in teams, even within organizations. It’s one thing to be a leader of my life, but it’s a whole other level to be an effective leader on a team. I think the whole class would agree that teams have been a part of our whole lives growing up, and that’s just the beginning. In college, we are involved in teams and our career will also provide us with teams. In this course, I am most interested in how I can leverage my strengths and opportunities in a team setting to maximize team performance.

I understand leadership as a drive to do something great with others who all have the same vision to accomplish a dream. It can be as simple as studying with a group of students to receive an A on a test or as big as starting a campus-wide philanthropy to raise money for a cause. Leadership is happening at every moment in our lives, sometimes we just don’t realize it or take the chance to reflect on it. What’s amazing about leadership to me is that there is always something more about it to learn. At the beginning of this year, I took my first leadership studies minor course on personal leadership. After having a leadership internship this past summer through Target, I thought I was an expert on leadership. I’ll never forget on the first day of class the professor said, “Raise your hand if you think you know a lot about leadership.” Of course I was one of the few students who thought we were all “know-it-alls”. After we raised our hands, he simply said you don’t know a lot about leadership. Ouch. I swallowed my pride and allowed myself to soak up any and all information I could learn about leadership from that point on in my life. I learned a wealth of knowledge about leadership just from that course, which tells me that this is only the beginning.

My expectations for myself in this class are to apply the knowledge I learn to my daily life, whether that be in my sorority or my next internship with Target. I also expect myself to participate in class discussions more than once a day to get the most of this amazing opportunity that Ohio State has to offer.