On November 17th, many members of DSWS volunteered their time at three different places. I volunteered at the Goodwill on High Street. We spent most of our time helping out around the store, organizing clothing, picking up empty hangers, taking out broken ones, removing old clothing and putting clothing back in its appropriate section. We did this from 11 until 4, after which we met back on campus.

On October 21st, A group of scholars and other volunteers went to the Columbus Marathon’s water stop on Woodruff avenue and volunteered our time. We started at 7am setting up tables and filling cups with water and Gatorade for the runners. Our first runners didn’t come until 10 and it started off slow but pretty soon, we had hundreds of runners coming through and we handed water and Gatorade to any of them who wanted it. Runners were coming until around noon, most of the runners were through by that time. We helped clean up and were all wrapped up by 1pm.

In taking the True Colors personality test, I learned that I am considered to have an orange personality, though I was nearly split between a green. People with orange personalities tend to be more adventurous, opportunistic and creative than those in the other three color groups: Gold tend to be organized and responsible, blue tend to be caring and compassionate and green tend to be more curious and determined. I think that orange with a minor in green, so to speak, is a good analysis of who I am and I can apply this information within my scholar’s group and within other group. I plan to apply it by using my tendencies to be opportunistic and creative to help groups that I am a part of work through solutions using out of the box solutions and new,           un-thought of ideas. I will also try to allow people that have different personalities to excel in what they are good at. For example, I would want people that have more of a gold personality to take to the planning and organizing of projects, as that is their strong suit.

Leadership, to me, is about being an example for others and for yourself. Trying to be the best leader one can be, whether directly or indirectly, makes someone work toward being the best person they can be.

An example of leadership that I have seen in my life was during my sophomore year of high school and it was with my golf coach. I come from a small school and our golf team was small and usually didn’t have the number to have a full JV and varsity team. My junior year, however, many new people came out to start golfing, many of them had never played before or had played very little and my coach was starting his first year as coach. Throughout the year, he was, alone, managing 15 players, putting together matches, working a full time job at a golf course and through it all he still managed to personally help every player improve their game. He always made time to help players get better or talk to them about how to be more sportsman like or how to stay calm during a close match.

My golf coach was a great example of a good leader because, while he did coach players and make them better, he went out of his way to know every player personally and make them better as a person and a player. He did this, not only directly as a coach, but also my example; he would always keep calm during tough situations and would work to come up with a reasonable solution to problems players, other teams or golf course staff were having. He was also a leader in that he made sure his players were getting better in every aspect of their lives, while he could have just focused on golf, he also went out of his way to help students with school work or family life.

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