Leadership, the essential life skill. by Nicholas

Leadership, the essential life skill. by Nicholas - March 2015 Scholarship Essay

Leadership is by far the most useful skill to have in academia. As a leader I have had the ability to foster cooperation and collaboration between myself and my classmates. Using leadership training that started when I was a young martial artist and has continued to this day in multiple facets I can say that being able to lead is an essential skill to be successful. My classmates and I work together very closely, we learn together, do homework together, and research together. As a class we are all doing very well, because we've done it together. I unquestionably would not have A's in all my classes if I didn't learn on my classmates where I have weaknesses. If I didn't have good leadership would we all be working together as a unit? No. As a unit we are all succeeding, together.

When classes started a few of us had met but we didn't work together. All of us suffered for it. As we started to get to know each other I started to see people with strength and weaknesses. No one person was perfect. As a group however, we had a formidable team. With some convincing we all started to work together and collaborate. I watched with happiness as not only my own grade started getting better from learning together but everyone reported they were doing better. We did have some issues, but we managed them.

As a leader it is important to make sure everyone is equally yoked. If someone isn't putting in their effort the whole team is hurt for it! While from the beginning almost everyone worked well together and put forward equal effort we had some people who required convincing. As someone who had taken on a leadership role it was my job to go to them and help them to understand why we needed them and their help. As a good leader I absolutely did not want to ostracize them from the group, but I couldn't allow them to feed off everyone's hard work. So I worked with them and tried to show them how their lack of effort was hurting the group as a whole and the individuals. Slowly but surely, they came to see how they did have benefit for the group and had a responsibility to themselves and to everyone else.

As a leader I knew I had just as much work to do, if not more. I had to complete my portion of academic work and help keep the group on track. It is not easy to be a leader but it is worth it. As time has progressed everyone has grown closer together and continued to do better at a team. Just like a parent is proud of their child who grows up and makes good choices. As a leader I am proud of my team of classmates for stepping up and working together. They make the team, but without good leadership I don't know if they ever would have made the team the way it is. So with absolute certainty I can say leadership is an essential skill to being successful not only in college but in life.