Welcome.
I just graduated from the University of Washington in March with a B.A. in Psychology. I decided to enroll in the UW Husky Leadership Certificate program to reflect on how I have grown as a leader in my community during my time in college. By reflecting on those experiences, I was able to identify my values and strengths, which will help me as I begin to navigate life outside of college.
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Engaged Mentor
Whenever I have the privilege of serving as a mentor, I always take that role very seriously. I always try to place myself in the shoes of those I am mentoring and I ask my mentees a lot of questions about their goals. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I can most effectively help my students to reach their goals.
Resilient Learner
I love learning, but I will admit that college itself has not always been easy for me. Once I got to college I began to struggle a lot more in my classes. I was having a very difficult time with the structure of college classes. I quit sports and spent less time with my friends in order to boost my grades, which made me feel sad. I also ended up developing really bad test taking anxiety. I would panic every night before I had a test, even if I had studied. During the tests my mind would go blank and I forget a large amount of what I had studied. I eventually ended up dropping out of college for 7 months because of that. Nonetheless, I learned how to ease my test taking anxiety and study in ways that work well for me. I’ve now made the Dean’s list 4 quarters in a row, which was something I never thought I would do when I was a freshman. Most importantly, I now know that GPA does not reflect the quality of the knowledge you have.
Zealous Educator
Some of my most uplifting moments in college have been when I have been teaching others. I had my first experience with teaching when I started working as a swim instructor in high school. To say the least, I have learned that teaching is no easy feat. There were many days where I would come home after teaching swimming lessons all day and just fall asleep on the couch as soon as I got home. However, what always kept me going during those exhausting (and often very challenging) moments of teaching was when I thought about how much of an impact my work was going to have on others. It always made my day to see my students drastically improve as a result of my efforts. I certainly hope to continue teaching in some way in the future.
Enlightened Traveler
As wonderful as it is to travel to Europe to eat delicious food and drink wine, I aim to learn something from every place that I travel to. I enjoy learning about the cultures of the different places I go. I visited a total of 7 countries when I studied abroad this fall, and I greatly enjoyed learning about each country and meeting people from all of those countries.