Here are some connections I’ve made to leadership beyond my classroom experience.
The Well
As a student media specialist at the Wellness Resource Center I have had the opportunity to be involved in a variety of extremely creative and fairly intensive projects. My primary mission in the role is to help create and distribute the Stall Seat Journal, a monthly potty publication centered around holistic student health, and also to produce any extra or multimedia components that can accompany the Stall Seat and further give the student body more opportunity to connect with the content in a way that will hopefully resonate. After working there for four years, I’ve seen different teams, different leaders, different tasks and different methods, and the leadership theory that I feel most clearly and consistently applies to my experience at the well is the Transformational Leadership Theory.
The former director of the Well, Linda Hancock, was an extremely inspirational individual with a moving mission and expansive vision. In her heart she believed and understood the role and the importance of the Well and those values were also communicated and passed down to her employees which just happened to be students like me. We also came to understand that the message of health and wellness that the Well promoted was one that was noble and worthy to be served.
We felt like we were chosen for a reason: to make the Well look as cool as possible so that more students are drawn to it so that they could be healthy using the knowledge that we shared with them. We all love Linda so much. It was an extremely deep-seated emotional attachment and when she retired we all felt a little emptier inside but there’s no denying that the impact that she had on the Well and the university was transformative.
Below is a short video about alcohol awareness featuring the Linda Hancock.
RAM CAMP
My entire RAM CAMP experience has been awesomeness. Wow I feel like I talk about RAM CAMP so much but I love it. It really confirms something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: the cycle of student leadership. From Camper to Leader to Director, I was immersed in a community that valued individuality and inclusion, which I am great at. I met amazing people with lovely names and funny jokes. Relationships built and shared with me deepened into roots that connected me to the campus. Student leadership is a friendly feedback loop of pure peer impact that is caused by AND causes even more student leadership. My experience is a perfect example of the Leadership Pipeline Model. This model shows where leaders should spend their time, what behaviors they need to exhibit, and what challenges are likely at different organization levels. At each stage, the I was able to observe roadmap offered by the levels above me so that I could chart my career progression.
The Writing Center
I am a Senior Writing Consultant at the Writing Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. Our mission is to “provide assistance at all stages of the writing process, from brainstorming to final draft.” Students come to us with papers, poems, personal statements, short stories and more. They often come for help and advice on spelling and punctuation. I help them with those things, yes, but my main goal is to convince them to believe that their words and stories and experiences have value.
It’s not always easy though. Sometimes those talks are tough. We have a conversation about their writing and they end up touching my heart more than I could have ever touched their paper. We influence each other continuously through collaboration and creativity, using writing as a tool for thinking, learning, and discovery.
The leadership theories or frameworks that most closely align with my insights gained from working as a Writing Consultant are the influence tactics. On the job, I find myself having to influence the students to see their writing, their ideas and themselves in a bit of a different light so that we can fully progress it to the powerful piece of writing that it could be.
The meeting itself is literally a consultation. They come to me in order to see how to make their writing “better” and sometimes just wanna hand their paper to me, detach and let me deal with the punctuation. I, the agent, have to ask them, the target, to fully participate in the planning activity. Including them enables and empowers them to be fully involved in their work.
During these consultations, I take notes on what I notice to help me visualize my consulting process and to give to the student if it would help them. I have filled quite a few notebooks with scribbles and doodles pertaining to these consultations. Here are some examples of these illustrative annotations.
