Month: May 2020

Leadership Development

Unfortunately, I tend to be a fairly shy person when offered positions of leadership; I tend to be self-effacing and avoidant of positions that would make me “the center of attention,” in a sense. I want to find a way to change this and to become more comfortable with leadership positions, as I don’t want to limit myself within my future academics or career. Within the next couple years of college, I intend to run for an executive board position for a service-based student organization, so I will both have to speak personally to my own skills and their value within that position, and I will have to acclimate myself to be “the center of attention.” Even if I would fail to achieve the position I run for, I would still be demonstrating comfort — or at least beginning a process of becoming comfortable — with a leadership position.

A regret I am leaving ACES with is that I did not run for the Leadership Committee, simply because I was unsure of myself. That regret should not follow me, and it has taught me that I should pursue goals that align with my imagination and ambition, even if I feel some slight element of self-doubt. This regret has taught me that self-doubt only leads to regret, and that I should not indulge it.

Academic Enrichment

After my first semester at Ohio State, I unfortunately found myself with some unfortunately bad grades and needing to reassess my efforts as a student. Over the past few semesters, I have spent most of my time working on classwork and fulfilling academic requirements to make up for that difficult first semester, but I also feel as though I missed some other enriching opportunities as a result of my hyper-focus on academics. Now that I am more adjusted to college and what college classwork is like, I hope to spend more of my time working on pursuing extracurricular academic opportunities.

Since I am looking into pursuing very competitive academic and career paths, I realize I need to boost the skills and knowledge I learn in my classes with knowledge gained outside of the classroom. Due to this, even beyond my participation in ACES and into my years as a junior and senior, I hope to pursue more service- and leadership-based activities, particularly those centered around the environment and solidarity with local communities, to both achieve beneficial change for those causes and to obtain the extracurricular skills needed to further those causes in the future.

In this photo, I am standing with several performers and audience members, after a benefit variety show for the Morgan Harper for Congress campaign. Of all my experiences in college and all the activities in which I have been involved, this was perhaps one of the most significant to me personally; in collaboration with the staff of a campaign that was getting significant national attention, I helped to organize and stage a show for someone who gave me a great amount of hope for the future of my community. In fact, the show may be most significant in that it made me hopeful for the future and made me feel as though I was personally helping to effect some change within the community. As a younger person who will graduate with heaps of student debt into a world that will almost certainly be racked with crises, I realized through this show that, for the benefit of people in a similar position to me and in less privileged positions than my own, I have some duty to participate in change. I cannot wait for more people like Morgan Harper to appear and forward solutions; instead, I should participate in forwarding those solutions myself.

This is a photo from about four years ago, in which I am sitting with my mother, sister, and grandfather. Unfortunately, before the beginning of my Sophomore year, my grandfather passed away due to a recurrent illness. Though my grandfather and I sometimes disagreed on certain things, he was very supportive of me nonetheless, and was a very generous, kind person — though he would not necessarily admit that himself. Also, he was a very intellectually curious person, always seeking out new information about people, objects, and concepts; for example, he would always ask me questions about music and musical instruments and concepts, not because he was a musician himself but because he was simply curious about how music functioned. What I appreciate about my grandfather is, he always gave me something new to learn about or to research, when he found something we were both unsure of. He made me a more curious person, and that is something I intend to keep with me.