In this post, I discuss my experiences as a member of the College Park Scholars Public Leadership program after my first semester at UMD. I have had an excellent first semester, despite the many challenges the COVID-19 pandemic has applied to my time here. I look forward to more memories, greater growth, as well as future struggles that college will present to me. I have always believed that life is an adventure, and I cannot wait for the next steps in the coming semesters.
For me, leadership has always meant the ability to motivate a group toward a common goal, but I’ve always thought of leadership on a small scale. I was, and continue to be, a believer in leadership of the everyday through recognizing, supporting, and pushing others to be their best in order to create a positive environment around all of us. I still firmly uphold this definition of leadership and I continue to be inspired to act upon that definition daily. Over the course of this semester, though, I have been challenged to think about this concept from different angles to stretch it to all that it can mean. I have discovered that this motivation and the skills that come along with leadership can be used on a greater scale to think about topics of social justice, race, poverty, equality, and so much more. While I still believe in the power of small actions that can make a difference, I am now more aware of greater actions that must be taken to create real change. Part of this adjustment of my thinking came from my experience in PL Colloquium as we talked about the greatest issues plaguing our world and the impact these issues have on every community. I was not expecting to focus so much on current events, but I am grateful that we did because this gave me this important perspective, and I wish we would have learned more about ways to actualize our change that we are encouraged to instill.
As far as my time as a university student, my experience has been excellent so far, despite the curveballs that COVID-19 has thrown into our midst. Even though classes are online, I still felt as if I gained a great deal and the work I was assigned was productive. Having taken a gap year, I feel as if that experience prepared me well for university life that I had envisioned, which is pretty close to the actual experience. I would even say that the life I live on campus is even better than I had expected it to be with the pandemic. When UMD announced that we would be on campus but online this year with COVID, I was very worried that I would be stuck all day in my room. This, however, has been far from my reality. Social life is still booming and I am slowly building my community as I learn the ins and outs of the university. As I continue into my future at UMD, I hope that my experience will become more “typical” as students before me have lived, and that I continue to enjoy my academics and extracurriculars here.
My courses at UMD have offered me a great deal of opportunities to learn and grow as a student. My course load this semester has been lighter than expected, but they are in a wide variety of topics, from discussing the role of fatherhood to the impacts of the Iran Nuclear Deal. My courses have been how I expected them to be, although they are online, and they all give reasonable workloads and have been graded fairly so far.
Despite the eclectic combination of courses, I have seen a large amount of overlap or correlation in my studies. One example of a connection is between my family science course entitled “Man Up! Where are the Fathers?!” and my Policy201 class for Public Leadership. In both classes we have discussed the current policing in America, but both classes have offered different lenses through which to view this topic. In my class on fatherhood we studied the impact of police brutality and mass incarceration on Black fathers and how they raise their children, and in Policy we discussed it to figure out how to improve it. This overlap, I felt, gave me a complete understanding of the issue and allowed me to improve my thoughts toward this on both accounts.
Finally, although I am establishing myself as a student at UMD, I still hold ties from my high school life close to me. I remain in contact with some of my favorite teachers from high school (even though I graduated in 2019) and they continue to serve me as mentors and supporters. My high school that I went to was also a very small school with very strong community bonds, but most importantly with very important shared values. These values, such as respect, community building, caring for others, etc. continue to influence me daily as I enter campus and further develop the kind of person I want to be.
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