To Thrive or Survive: That is the question, but the answer is up to you by Audry

To Thrive or Survive: That is the question, but the answer is up to you by Audry - March 2015 Scholarship Essay

College is a funny place. It essentially functions as a reset button that allows students the opportunity to become the person that they always wanted to be in the first place. Of course, the characteristics that this potential person encompasses are entirely up to the student in question. The molding of a person into who they are meant to be depends largely on their determination to get to that point, which ties back in to their goals on coming to college in the first place. It is easy enough to just get by with a degree, but I personally have found that college has so much more to offer. Granted, it partially depends on how one chooses to define success. Perhaps it can simply be translated to “satisfaction with the results of an endeavor.” But again, I don’t think it is enough to just be satisfied.

As we walk out the doors on graduation day, we take with us four years of (in some cases, literal) blood, sweat, and tears. Quite frankly, crashing out into the real world like a tax-paying bull in a massively vast china shop sounds terrifying. But we have been preparing for this, right? To take our learning and go make something of ourselves. Well, I can write papers all day long on Gerschenkron economics as applied to the German legislative system. Or I could expound for hours on the many differing characteristics of gram negative and positive bacteria. But at the end of the nine to five o’ clock work day, what does all that really matter? So students join extracurricular clubs and teams and organizations. Here is where progress really starts to be made. Students actually work with people, actually have to coordinate events and projects where guidelines aren’t tailored to be easy and understandable. Here is where we begin to learn to lead.

It seems so simple and obvious that I feel like it is often overlooked. Extracurricular activities can make or break a college career, can be the difference between students becoming that person that they only imagined, or schlepping their way through as if university is just the extended edition of high school. The especially important part about students learning to lead via these varying organizations is that they learn what leadership really, truly means. It is not just saying things, and then those things magically getting done. Leadership is being in tune with constituents and listening. So much listening. And being an example worth following. Strangely enough, these sorts of traits, once acquired, tend to carry over into other areas. The classroom. Interpersonal relationships, romantic and otherwise. The value of being able to see beyond yourself and sync in to your surroundings quite literally cannot be overstated. In learning this lesson, students begin to see that perhaps they are not a wildly unprepared and out of place bull, but something else entirely. In learning to lead others, they learn to trust themselves to lead their own lives in the direction that they were meant to go.

So can success really be defined by becoming a leader? Maybe not, but even if we choose to simply define success as personal happiness, I find it hard to believe that some degree of leadership is not involved. Life is about nothing if not balance, so I would think that it is not enough to just get an academic degree. It may not say it on the diploma, but I want to be more than just a biology major. I want to be an effective communicator, a great listener, some one that leaves an impact that is both positive and lasting. We get in the way of our own success when we choose to settle for mediocrity. So as a college student, we should choose to create our own definition of success. We should have a desire to leave our future professions better than we found them and be an example that others look to for guidance. In order to accomplish this goal, I cannot help but feel that leadership is an essential component. So many universities play their part magnificently in giving us all of the tools that we could possibly need to achieve success by our own definitions- now all we have to do is make the most of it by realizing our potential.