Know When to Not Follow by Elizabeth

Know When to Not Follow by Elizabeth - March 2015 Scholarship Essay

College is an entirely new world, without most of the rules and authorities that restrict your life throughout grade school and at home. In college, you are independent and autonomous. You’ll encounter few group projects, and you are responsible for no one but yourself. The idea of maintaining leadership skills from high school during college seems like a waste of energy. The only problem with throwing leadership skills out the nearest window is that you are independent and responsible for yourself!

Leadership skills don’t always mean you are in charge of others; often leadership skills allow you to remain wholly in charge of yourself, to make the choices that you mean to make. In college you will not be bound by the rules and authority of before, but you will be pulled, pressured, and twisted around in every possible way. If you have no ability or experience to lead, your only option is to follow. Changing your ideology or opinion of something is not always bad, it is often both good and necessary to develop into a true independent adult, but not every convincing argument is right, or good for you.

Leadership skills, such as: the ability to prioritize, discernment of the strengths, weaknesses, and intentions of other, foresight into the outcomes of individual and group actions, time management, the ability to compromise and communicate, and to maintain conviction, are necessary to stay afloat in the spinning cycles of opinions from professors, friends, roommates, and every other person you’ll encounter in college life.

If you cannot prioritize your own life, you may end up kicked out of college for not attending classes because you are pledging a crazy sorority that assured you nobody actually goes to class. When you can see into people, and easily get a feel for who they are, it will steer you away from the people who will get you into trouble or convince you of things that you should have known weren’t true! With time management, comes the ability to balance your classes, your friends, your knitting hobby, or whatever else you do.

The ability to communicate and compromise are crucial for the roommate fiasco (there is always a fiasco-situation), but also when learning and making friends. I’m sure your parents are great people, and your home town is probably spectacular, but the things you are taught before college is generally one sided. They may be completely right, but it may not be right for you as an adult, or maybe they are just wrong. Knowing how to listen, understand, and consider various view points before making a decision is a hallmark of a good leader and a successful college student.

On the other side of the compromising coin, is conviction. Learning and compromising are a necessary part of development, but losing conviction can result in losing yourself in a number of ways. Whether it is being pressured to surrender your religious beliefs by an aggressively atheist professor, being shamed for your choices about your body by militant zealots, being told you are lame for not going to parties, or being told you are wasting your life by majoring in Philosophy, it is crucial to know who you are, and where other people need to mind their own business. The balance between compromise and conviction is necessary in leadership, and key to college success.

You may not be coaching a team, running a business, or doing major group projects in college, but you will have complete authority over yourself. Leadership skills are necessary to succeeding in college. Without knowing how to lead, you will never know who or what you should follow.