Rise by Israel

Rise by Israel - March 2015 Scholarship Essay

Leadership skills are essential to both our personal lives and our career paths. Our lives require order and action in everyday situations to complete even the simplest tasks. As leaders, we can provoke synergy and provide an initiative to anyone who does not have a clear vision of how success can be acquired. Eventually at some point in our lives we will have to lead a team, a project or even our own businesses. I believe students should practice leadership in order to thrive at higher levels in college.

My closest encounter with leadership was during my eight grade year in junior high, where I was a vice president speaker in a club named Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Every few years, the club is expected to run out of student speakers to lead the fellowship’s members, due to graduations. That year became my turn to leave and with high school only a semester away, finding suitable candidates to succeed us would be difficult. In addition to this problem, most of the remaining members were shy sixth and seventh graders that had little to no experience speaking in front of a small crowd. Some of them were even discouraged at what would happen once we would be gone. As the vice president speaker, it was my job to encourage fellow students to take action and lead the club for the upcoming year.

I scheduled a meeting to discuss our current situation with the student board of representatives. My idea became that over the next few weeks, we had to find the special qualities of each member of the current fellowship group that would be interested in running for a position. After this time period we met again to discuss our findings and brought them all together in an orderly fashion. This plan proved successful because it allowed us to view the great qualities of all our possible candidates, making it easier to cast a vote on the ones who were more prepared. After selecting our new representatives, our next challenge became for each of the board of representatives, to train their own successor. My personal approach to training my apprentice was to teach him how to build a fellowship because that was the main purpose of the club, simple as that! I taught him the most important components of fellowship, which I believe to be, honesty, humility, courtesy, confidentiality and frequency.

After putting my method into practice, I noticed very positive results. So much, in fact, I decided to also put it into practice with the other students. Our students responded in a very agreeable manner to my approach and we ended up lifting the entire club’s spirit with new hope. We then left the club knowing that it was in good hands and did not have to worry about the future of it. Not only did we find new leaders to represent us but we also strengthened our club and inspired others to rise up and take responsibility when they are needed. This experience transformed me into a more capacitated person and encouraged me to become more responsible for those around me.