HONR 401: Alumni Mentorship Program

 The fall of my Junior year I participated in the Honors seminar, Growing the Leader in You, a class that was catered to learning about how to develop our personal leadership skills, as well as to invent and implement  a honors alumni mentoring program. Both individually and as a class, we explored our strengths and weaknesses as leaders in rediscovering our results from the StrengthFinder assessment that we took in the HONR 201 class, realizing the honesty of my results in exploring them further. We wrote down these results on the board and discussed how each of our results could bring something vital to our work as a group in creating our pilot alumni mentoring program. Additionally, as a part of class, we researched leaders of the past and present and critiqued  their leadership model, focusing on the pros and cons of how they utilized their leadership capabilities. Then, as a team, we used this newly formed understanding of leadership to distinguish a goal of something beneficial that we wanted to see proposed to future students in the Honors Program. We decided that an alumni mentorship program could help students develop in the leadership competency by giving them leaders to model themselves after. I worked with my classmates and in and outside of class to create a proposal presentation to present to the Honors program. I used my strength in always striving for improvement to critique what we had developed so far for the presentation and how it could be improved. I utilized by other teammates skills  of  technological expertise to assist with the weaknesses I have in this area. We all tapped into our own strengths in developing the project, whether it was totaling survey data or communicating with valuable campus resources.  As a team we produced a finished presentation that we were all proud of.