Foothill College Scholarship Essay "Leadership"

Write an essay titled "Leadership" in which you describe the lessons you've learned from your prior leadership experience.

“Leadership”

I decided to step into a leadership role on campus was because I generally enjoy guiding other students throughout their college journey and enjoy being there for them whenever they need me. As a student who entered Foothill College, who does not know anything, the extremely simple process such as class registration to somewhat complicated ones such as the transfer process; it was hard for me to find the information that I wanted, mainly because everything was conducted online. It took me some time to figure out how does everything works, but I always thought that if I had a mentor who could guide me with the part I was struggling with, it could have been much better. At first, as a newbie who was completely left out alone in an online space, making friends online was not also an easy part. It seemed nearly impossible for me to make friends or become a mentor to other students, but I found out that you have to be more active in the online world. As soon as I became more active and decided to help others, I was already in a leadership role.

I could end up where I am right now because I had support from my friends, who are now my teammates. Without them, I do not think I could have accomplished so many good projects or planned good projects. When I first entered Foothill College, during my first quarter, I met my partner Isabelle. After getting to know each other better, we started to talk about creating a social entrepreneurship organization, and we started everything from scrap. From assigning the name of the organization to recruiting people and so on, there is not one part that we didn’t discuss while we were going through this journey. Since we had to communicate everything online, the process took much more time than I thought, but these experiences made me realize the importance of communication among teammates. Now, our organization has more than 20 active students worldwide, and more than 10 projects are ongoing. In our group, I always stress that effective communication could be critical to all tasks they are working on. Because I learned that better communication skills could help you to reduce your time struggling alone and provide you with more abundant ideas. As our organization continues to grow, we are working on being more communicative in a large group now despite the difference in time zones and locations.

I learned that when running an organization and being a leader, there are many situations where I face difficulties in multiple aspects. If I only talk regarding marketing and programs, I can say that I faced difficulty promoting the organization and creating the programs per our teammates’ interests. I think we all know how hard it is to promote your organization or company that you just started. Even when you live in a Covid free world, it is already hard to promote at first. In the online world, it was even worse. Because everyone was exhausted from this fatal disease taking over the world for such a long time, the atmosphere was depressed in general. To overcome this matter, what I did was to reach out to students actively through social networks such as Instagram, and Facebook. These connections allowed me to introduce our group, improved our organization awareness, and ended up in a place where we are right now. The other hardship was creating the programs per the interest of each teammate. I first thought that working on the same project with multiple people would work well, but instead, I allowed them to have their projects and become leaders of their own projects to make them devoted and feel more responsible towards that. Because the projects are each created on their own with ideas, which is also supported by the other teammates, this liberated method, so far encourages our teammates to be more responsible and active.