It's Your First Day of College, How Will You Stand Out? by Kaelyn

It's Your First Day of College, How Will You Stand Out? by Kaelyn - March 2015 Scholarship Essay

It’s your first day at college and you find that you are surrounded by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of other students just like you. For potentially the first time in your life you are faced with students who are smarter and more skilled than you. Suddenly, you don’t quite stand out academically or athletically like you did in high school. For many, this can be a very humbling or even threatening experience. The one thing, though, that you may have that others lack are leadership skills. Not everyone who was successful in high school has these skills that are essential to not only making yourself stand out throughout your college career, enriching your college experience. This is the one skill set that not everyone who attends college is capable of, but if you have do have leadership skills it will certainly make you more of a contender in the game of life and throughout your college.

The entire purpose for the vast majority of students attending college is to get a career when they graduate. This means that, somehow, they have to make themselves stand out throughout their college career. With so many other students who are equal or better than you in various aspects like academics, athletics, and extracurricular involvement, this can be a very daunting task. Being a leader can be the answer to this tricky scenario. By taking risks and stepping up to the plate, you get your name out into the world, and, more often than not, these risks highly pay off in the long run. If you are known as the student who takes charge, suddenly many people will begin looking to you for answers or advice, and believe me, word spreads fast on a college campus. Soon students will be seeking you out to lead clubs, organizations, events, and offering many other opportunities that will only perpetuate your leader image. Professors recognize those students who take charge and reward them by giving them good grades, offering them real-world experiences like fellowships, internships, and externships, and even, at the very least, writing them really good recommendation letters. Leaders are well known and recognized on campus, even though their grades or involvement may be equal or lesser to that of their peers.

Not only do leadership skills get you much needed respect, they also are essential skills to simply succeeding during your college career. Those who envelop leadership skills are typically high-reaching and high-achieving students because, as stated earlier, they are willing to take risks. They are willing to format their presentation differently from the rest, which in turn may get them a better grade in the class because of their out-of-the-box thinking. In addition, they are immediately recognized as the group leader for all those dreaded group projects, which in turn gets them more respect from their peers and professors. One cannot consider college a success unless you chose to put yourself out there so to speak and simply enjoy the experience. If you are simply one who wishes to exist throughout college and graduate with a degree, you will not reap the same benefits as your fellow peer who was a leader. While grades are certainly important in college, it is the experience that really counts in life.

Employers want leaders in their offices and field, they don’t want people who skated by in college and simply obtained a degree. They seek those who stood out and took chances, and what better way to prove this than to exemplify being a leader? This will not only get you name recognition when applying for that dream job, but it will be clear that you have the highly coveted leader personality during your interview. Leadership skills are absolutely necessary to college success in more ways than one. They are what get you the perfect job, earn respect from your peers and professors, and make yourself stand out on a campus full of nameless students. It is important to take those risks and put yourself out there to lead the group, because this will pay off in the end and you will find that when you graduate college you got more than just a degree.