Learning how to lead can be as forboding and intimidating as a dark path
For students new to it, learning how to lead can be hard, not to mention intimidating. Even for students with some experience, leading is a concept that isn’t the most intuitive. Are you supposed to just take charge in every group assignment? Make sure your voice is the loudest? Delegate responsibility until all that’s left is you as supreme overlord of the Sith and—ok, maybe not that last point. The truth is, leadership is something so dynamic and diverse that there isn’t a single way to learn it. That was one of the main guiding principles behind this conference I attended last Saturday called UConnect, a leadership conference based in University College.
Resume writing is more difficult than this illustration makes it out to be. Image courtesy of Pixabay.
I stepped into the halls of Sid Smith, resume in hand, feeling confident. I had a few questions in mind that I wanted to ask the career educator I was placed with at the Resume Blitz, but I wasn’t feeling completely hopeless or lost. (For now, at least.)
Growing up I was so painfully shy. If I went through a day saying 10 words to someone that would be me having a "talkative" day. While I still consider myself to be a pretty shy person and am someone…
My most recent U of T event adventure: The Literary Fair
Before I was even accepted to U of T, I heard rumors about how supposedly difficult and heartless it was. It was a place where 4.0s were unachievable, peers were competitive, and social lives were obsolete.
However, once I actually arrived at U of T, I found out that wasn’t true. There are all sorts of opportunities for career-related and academic success, as well as networking and friendships. One way I like to network, seek out opportunities, and explore my career options is through U of T events and workshops.
One of my new year's resolution was to improve my photography methods by taking a picture a week
January is the month of New Year's resolutions – discounted gym memberships, free calendars, half price journals and schedules, cook books with new recipes for the year, etc. It seems as if everyone is ready to ditch their old habits from the previous year and start a fresh positive life. However, as January ends, this hype slowly fades away. Why?
Reflecting on another stressful holiday season
“So, how’s school going?”
“What are you studying?”
“And what do you plan to do with that degree?”
The only thing scarier than homemade fruitcake and the song “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Clause” during the holidays is the bombardment of questions from relatives and family friends pertaining to my career during holiday get-togethers. However, I could easily be persuaded that their responses to my answers are even scarier.
This could be me one day. Photo by Peggy Margo via Pixabay
Networking makes me uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that I try to do it as infrequently as possible. That’s why I decided to attend the Career Centre’s Talking to Professionals workshop to learn more about how to network, and how to become more comfortable doing so. Since networking can sometimes be just as important in finding a job as your actual resume, I decided that it was time to overcome my fear.
Before I made the decision to finish my education, I was fortunate enough to experience the beginnings of a promising career in social innovation. It was an exciting time because I was working in a community transitioning between a decade long recession and a promise of economic recovery. This community, at the time, was being courted by several large-scale industrial projects with deep pockets. Though the social implications from these projects' investments were mostly welcome, the challenge lay in figuring out how best to benefit from them, while mitigating as many negative social impacts as possible. The majority of my work involved leading projects that required me to be immersed in the world of social innovation.
The Community
Unfortunately, for all of the work I was doing on the ground, there were always significant obstacles being met at higher levels. I guess this is the plight of grassroots movements, but as frustrating as it was to experience, it also brought me to an understanding of the difficulties faced by today’s social innovators. In this understanding, the only way I could see myself becoming a more effective social innovator was to finish my degree and gain more access to higher level decision-making processes.
The audience could interact directly with the panelists through text
For a perfectionist who’s extremely insecure about my ideas, it’s a wonder I’ve been able to publish weekly blogs without collapsing under my own pressure.
In order to gain some insight into how to come up with good ideas—and how to make sure they’re actually good—I attended Entrepreneurship 100: Conversations, a live, interactive panel hosted by the Impact Centre in collaboration with the Career Centre. The panel featured three University of Toronto-affiliated entrepreneurs and centred on discussing where ideas come from, and how to tell if they’re any good. The audience could participate in the discussion through text, take part in polls, and ask the panelists questions. The entrepreneurs answered the audience’s questions and spoke about their experiences throughout their careers.
Study abroad has been a life changing international experience where I have learned to live independently, experience a new culture, and study in a different academic environment. Most of my posts have been about the fun parts of traveling and living “abroad” part of studying abroad and now I am going to focus on the main reason for my exchange which is to “study” abroad.
University College at U of T. It is amazing how British our architecture is. (Taken from: http://www.transitionresourceguide.ca/universities/university-of-toronto)
The Strand Campus at King’s College of London is home to the Art’s and Humanities Faculty and located in Central London.
(taken from: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/campus/strand.aspx)
