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Who leads a group of emerging leaders? Reflecting on the Emerging Leaders Institute group project
Melissa Bostrom sold me on applying to the Emerging Leaders Institute (ELI) with one word: “deliverable.” The program included many attractive characteristics: leadership training, self-assessments, and coaching. However, from the beginning I was focused on the group project – not simply as an exercise in working with others but to develop a concrete product that I can reference in future interviews as a significant accomplishment from those six weeks.
In the end, I got both – a learning experience in working with a team and a product that exists in the real world. (more…)
The importance of being diverse
Research is driven by inquiry, so I pause to ask, “What kind of graduate school would my graduate school be, if everyone in the graduate school were just like me?” If we throw aside the false notions that we are ideal, perfect individuals, then this question raises serious implications. My own reflection on a response to this question yields a very poignant reality that a graduate school full of “me” would be boring, unfruitful, and unproductive. We would all be political scientists. There would be no interest in microbiology, genetics, art history, or sociology for that matter. Furthermore, we would all ask the same questions and we would only be interested in the subfield of comparative politics within political science. A group of “me” would be a sad reality for contributions to and advancements in the humanities, medicine, and technology, for example. (more…)
