My Reflection

When I first enrolled in Leadership Theory, I will admit that I had a narrow sense of leadership. Mostly, it seemed like there was only one type of person who could be a leader. We’ve seen them–the type that speak loudly at every opportunity and states their opinions as if they are law. Through this course however, it is now clear that there are so many different ways to be a leader that it is laughable to think otherwise.

Of the theories discussed in class, I think adaptive leadership really resonated with me. I have had a variety of transitions in my life, between having different friend groups and job interests, so I think that having an adaptive style would be necessary to give me direction in achieving my goals. Within my personal life, I’m not one to have had the same set of consistent friends for longer than a year or two at a time, and I often find myself in the midst of new ones that have different power balances and thus different needs for leadership. Within my personal life, I have wanted to do a variety of different activities as I’ve grown up. From engineering to biomedical engineering, possibly being a doctor, to arriving at a love for computer science and technology, I have learned from a variety of different fields as far as what interests me and what I should pursue. Being confident in the path I have chosen has been something that I’ve improved on since the beginning of this semester.

From my personality paper, I enjoyed the feedback on being sure to put myself first and focus on making sure I am doing what is best for myself. Being an ENFJ personality type has lead me to crave validation and acceptance in many areas of my life. Although being accepted and understood by my peers has its wonderful perks, sometimes being extroverted comes at the cost of my own fulfillment. That is why I have been working towards changing my self sacrificing behaviors.

I’ve tried to implement this in my daily life in a variety of ways. I’m slowly but surely getting better at the art of saying no when I am overbooked. This means when I have three events I’m invited to on a weekend, I resist the urge to try to attend all three. Because of this, I have been able to be more present in the events that I do attend and have been having a lot more rich experiences. In addition, even though I may feel like I’m letting down a friend by not going to their event, they appreciate my honesty in setting their expectations. Because of this, I’m finding that I don’t “let people down” nearly as often as I thought I would be by not trying to go to everything. Moreover, it seems that I was letting people down more when I would half heartedly go to everything, spending little time in one place with an ever wandering mind.

In addition, I’ve been figuring out what is best for my future career goals and how that can be related to what I’m doing in school right now. I’m finding that even though a school like JHU should be a place where I should be pressured to learn and achieve as many things as possible, this doesn’t always equate to taking more classes. What many people say is true. Often, more learning happens outside of a lecture hall and definitely outside of a slide deck. I think that in my last semester at JHU I hope to pursue more diverse areas of study–reading more books, exploring Baltimore, and attending more computer science seminars. As long as I stay in a classroom mindset, I run the risk of craving the kind of security and easiness of it and restrict myself from all of the knowledge I’ll be learning “in the real world”. This is why next semester I’m taking it upon myself to try to learn from every new opportunity! I’m excited at looking into new graphic design courses at MICA, cooking classes in Hampdon, and general hobby pursuits I have planned for 2020.

Self Improvement

As a leader, I feel I have the most potential to grow in taking responsibility for my opinions on items and issues in a team. By this I mean that I need to improve from saying qualifying statements like “I’m pretty sure” or “I think”. Using language like this shields me from blame if my opinion is incorrect or if I have a completely off base answer. However, taking ownership of my ideas keeps me from feeling that I’ve really accomplished anything. By limiting myself from being wishy-washy about things, I hope to find more fulfillment in my leadership roles. Moving forward, I’ve been greatly improving by volunteering to take a project lead role or committing to group decisions more.

As far as what I hope to take from this class, I think this class helped me realize just how important leadership is to achieving goals. Regardless of whether I will be able to be a leader in the next few years, I’m always one rise to any challenge. This in itself I realized, is a form of leadership that I did not know of before this course. The fact that anyone can be a leader and everyone has to be a leader at some point is very enlightening and empowering.

After undergrad I will be starting as a full-time software engineer at Microsoft working on the new Xbox (which has recently been announced!). Within this new role, I’ll obviously have a lot to learn about graphics programming and related knowledge, and will be surrounded by team members that have been working on their projects for 5, 10, or even 20 years. I think that picking up on key ideas about followership will be important starting out at this new job because there will obviously be a large skill gap between myself and those that will mentor me. I think that learning about how followership can have depth and responsibility was important to me realizing that not being the leader doesn’t amount to being a loser in any capacity. Instead, being a follower means that I’m lucky enough to be in the position to learn something from a leader in a different field!

Course Feedback

As a participation grade, I feel that around a 98.5% would be appropriate. I always tried to participate in most discussions, but being a perfect contributor seems very subjective. Also, saying that I deserve a “perfect” participation grade seems like a very self assured thing to do.

To improve the class, I think having guest speakers from industry or around Hopkins talk about leadership in their life would be very interesting to ground some of the ideas from class.

My favorite assignment of this class was looking into women leaders in the workplace. In my opinion anyone entering the workplace should be educated on the struggle that women have historically had to face. It is important, especially as seniors in college, with so many of us entering graduate school and the workforce, to recognize systematic differences that men and women face. Given that so many of us as JHU graduates will someday be in a position of leadership in our fields, understanding oppressive forces and drives in the workplace is the first step in tackling them and dismantling them.

The most confusing assignment to me was our cultural deep dive, purely due to its vagueness in description. I did enjoy listening to the various presentations however, and liked how varied they were in how they interpreted the lesson assignment.

As far as items that could be added/removed, having a more simple midterm format would streamline the class structure a bit more. This being said, I liked that there was both a written and presentation component of the midterm because people were given more opportunities to excel at their strengths.
This class is truly unique at JHU both in its student lead learning and dynamic curriculum, so I hope to see it impact many more people in the years to come!