[{"id":108,"date":"2021-09-29T14:03:07","date_gmt":"2021-09-29T14:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/?page_id=108"},"modified":"2021-09-29T14:03:07","modified_gmt":"2021-09-29T14:03:07","slug":"legal-assistant-mowry-grimson-pllc","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/legal-assistant-mowry-grimson-pllc\/","title":{"rendered":"Legal Assistant: Mowry &amp; Grimson, PLLC"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/d2gtafdivcal5l.cloudfront.net\/images\/central_image\/employer_logo\/570673_20180503062140.gif\" width=\"117\" height=\"117\" \/><\/p>\n<p>July 2020 &#8211; Present<\/p>\n<p>As a legal assistant at Mowry and Grimson, PLLC, I have had the one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with trade analyst, associates, and partners that are highly knowledgeable in the field of international trade law. Working with and around those individuals has introduced me to the intricacies and challenges that involve the international trade law sector and the law field as a whole, helping me to gain important skills to better comprehend important aspects of law. Currently, my work involves monitoring tasks and providing aid to staff by completing projects. The content that I monitor involves important information and filings for cases that concern the firm, and this extends to a variety of different sources of information and filing. Because of this, it is important for me to monitor these different sources whenever required, find the relevant information or filings for particular cases, and distribute them to individual staff or the firm as a whole, thus keeping the entire team updated and able to act accordingly depending on the information or filing. Furthermore, the work that I help staff with individually involves certain cases specific projects that will help to formulate legal documents, submit those documents, or ensure that the legal process is upheld. These projects can range from a variety of tasks, all highly important to the success of the firm and the care for each client&#8217;s cases.<\/p>\n<p>The skills that I have learned throughout my time at the firm are interdependence and personal responsibility skills. During the process of becoming more interdependent, I had always struggled to ask others questions about tasks or ensure my understanding of the particular details of a task. As a result, it could be difficult to complete projects to the best of my ability, as I would lose confidence in my work. Nevertheless, while working at the firm, I have learned to speak up and ask questions, no matter the importance or difficulty of the question, as fully understanding a task is much more important than seeming to be an expert. Additionally, through the process of understanding personal responsibility in the work place, I never felt that I was in a position where I was depended upon to do vital work for the team. While my internships and academic work involved working in teams and having others rely on myself, the level of dependence grew significantly when starting my position at the firm. Thus, I began to learn and develop the mindset of always putting my most into the work I complete, as the work that I submit is vital towards the mission of my team. While I wasn&#8217;t submitting half-hearted work before, the level of importance towards individual work grew significantly. On top of these skills, I continued to maintain and grow my communication, flexibility and problem-solving skills, as working in a sector of law that I was unfamiliar with, it was important to continue to improve upon these skills for the betterment of my work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>July 2020 &#8211; Present As a legal assistant at Mowry and Grimson, PLLC, I have had the one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with trade analyst, associates, and partners that are highly knowledgeable in the field of international trade law. Working with and around those individuals has introduced me to the intricacies and challenges that involve the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2384,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-108","page","type-page","status-publish","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":99,"date":"2021-04-27T03:07:06","date_gmt":"2021-04-27T03:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/?page_id=99"},"modified":"2021-04-27T22:23:15","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T22:23:15","slug":"my-leadership-growth","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/my-leadership-growth\/","title":{"rendered":"My Leadership Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My definition of leadership has changed drastically since my start at American University. When I first arrived, I was unsure of what true leadership entailed and had a loose view of how to be a leader. I had experienced leadership through the sports I played or by trying to emulate my teacher\u2019s leadership styles, but I had no real concept of leadership. Today, I would say that I am much more educated and aware of different leadership styles, attributes, and concepts that allow me to define and analyze the various influential and successful leaders of our time. In the past, I might\u2019ve defined leadership as the ability of someone to make decisions to reach a goal. I would say now that my definition of leadership is the ability for an individual to motivate their followers and help them to obtain growth, in order to achieve the goals of the team. While these might not seem that much different, I believe that there is a drastic difference in the purpose of leadership between the two definitions that is highly important towards becoming a well-rounded leader. In understanding a new definition, I have been able to analyze people close to me and myself to determine the type of leadership style and attributes we possess. I have seen a variety of people express leadership styles and attributes that can drastically differ from one another, making it easier to understand how to better work with them. Additionally, when it comes to myself, through the various reflections that I have written regarding my leadership, I have been able to really understand my own leadership and change aspects of it to become a better leader.<\/p>\n<p>The way in which I have demonstrated the skills to work collaboratively is through the various teams I have worked within my campus, community service, or professional experience. In particular, when I interned for the Senate Diversity Initiative, I had to communicate and cooperate with my fellow interns and staff to solve certain issues. Through my abilities to reason, listen, understand, and compromise with my team, I was able to demonstrate that I had the capability of effectively collaborating with other individuals. I have also been able to build my theoretical and practical knowledge of leadership through my application of certain leadership styles. By learning more about the various leadership styles and approaches, I have been able to use the information to create theoretical structures for the types of leadership that are present, and then use the aspects of these approaches and styles to apply the practical knowledge of leadership.<\/p>\n<p>As I stated in my definition, I better understand leadership as a process through the impact that leadership has on the outcome of the goals of an organization and the impact on one\u2019s followers. The process of leadership involves encouraging, motivating, and lifting up followers to achieve their own goals and to inspire them to progress themselves. By doing this, it shows how leadership doesn\u2019t just involve holding a position of power and making decisions for a group of individuals. Rather, leadership is the importance of promoting the process of growth for one\u2019s followers and ensuring that they reach their full potential. The way in which I was able to engage in leadership behaviors and opportunities that reflect leadership as a process is through my willingness to take on roles that took me out of my comfort zone. In these leadership roles, while I was not particularly confident in my ability to lead, I challenge myself to commit to the experience, in order to enhance my leadership development. As a result, I was able to learn a lot about my leadership style and approach through my development and my engagement in a leadership role.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Leadership Growth - Orjuela\" width=\"1140\" height=\"641\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/3FQA2XpNs1U?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My definition of leadership has changed drastically since my start at American University. When I first arrived, I was unsure of what true leadership entailed and had a loose view of how to be a leader. I had experienced leadership through the sports I played or by trying to emulate my teacher\u2019s leadership styles, but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2384,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-99","page","type-page","status-publish","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/99\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":93,"date":"2021-04-26T18:32:20","date_gmt":"2021-04-26T18:32:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/?page_id=93"},"modified":"2021-04-27T03:26:27","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T03:26:27","slug":"personal-statement-on-leadership","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/personal-statement-on-leadership\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal Statement on Leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Leadership is the ability for an individual to motivate their followers and help them to obtain growth, in order to achieve the goals of the team. The process of inspiring one&#8217;s followers and aiding them in achieving the goals that they have establish is highly important towards being a well-rounded leader. In accomplishing this task, leaders are able to help their teams achieve the goals of the organization, while also helping each follower reach their full potential. Additionally, leaders who are able to succeed in helping their followers reach their potential gain the respect, charisma, and admiration to be trusted. This allows leaders to garner support for important decisions and be confident in the decisions that they make. Overall, the importance of the follower and leader relationship is essential for the functionality of a team and how well each individual works with one another. In order to reach this state, however, it is important for leaders to understand the leadership styles or approach that best suits themselves and their team. Having the recognition and knowledge of effective leadership is highly important towards the success of a leader, especially when having to deduce their own style of leadership. Once a leader is able to understand their own leadership, they can truly mold their leadership style in a way that benefits themselves and their followers. Ultimately, leadership is a complex process, rather than just a position, as the dedication that is required to establish effective leadership is difficult, but important for anyone who hopes to pursue a leadership role.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Leadership is the ability for an individual to motivate their followers and help them to obtain growth, in order to achieve the goals of the team. The process of inspiring one&#8217;s followers and aiding them in achieving the goals that they have establish is highly important towards being a well-rounded leader. In accomplishing this task, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2384,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-93","page","type-page","status-publish","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":91,"date":"2021-04-26T18:29:07","date_gmt":"2021-04-26T18:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/?page_id=91"},"modified":"2021-04-26T18:36:19","modified_gmt":"2021-04-26T18:36:19","slug":"chapter-president-phi-sigma-kappa","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/chapter-president-phi-sigma-kappa\/","title":{"rendered":"Legislative Intern: Office of Senator Charles Schumer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.democrats.senate.gov\/imo\/media\/image\/diversity%20initiative%20header2.jpg\" alt=\"diversity initiative header\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Internship<\/p>\n<p>January 2020 &#8211; April 2020<\/p>\n<p>During my time at Senator Schumer&#8217;s office, I was able to gain a lot of experience and knowledge about our political system from the team I worked with. I specifically interned in the Senate Diversity Initiative in Senator Schumer&#8217;s office, where I learned how to be more independent and understand the importance of reliability, but at the same time learned a lot by asking questions and being open to help. Our job at the Senate Diversity Initiative was to find diverse candidates to endorse for positions available on the Senate, in order to help diverse each Senate office. We work with all Senate Democratic caucus offices, as well as Senate Committees and a few congressional offices.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Reflection 1: Leader-Member Exchange Theory<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Reviewing the leader-member exchange theory and how that relates to my internship in the Senate Democrat Diversity Initiative, I found that my office atmosphere is very similar to this type of theory. While the process from Role-Taking to Role-Making was significantly faster in my opinion, there is an element of both that took place in my office environment. For example, the first day or two, there was a lot of introductions and understanding the roles that everyone plays in the office. The office is generally small though, so it was expected of us early, whether or not we were capable of performing or not, to take on assignments and work on our own work. Hence why I say that these phases move quicker than normal.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, though, I believe that there are some elements of both existing in the stage I am at right now. While we all have our own goals and assignments that we wish to pursue, there is an element of establishing our skills and abilities for our manager. Instead of it being established more and more to gain trust in each worker, my manager gives us important projects to complete and determines what our skills and abilities are through action. I think, while this can be overwhelming at times, is a important aspect of building the leader-member bond and gaining the trust of my manager, as the I believe the more I show I am capable of completing these tasks without constant help or confusion, the more I will build trust in my employer. Another example of this relationship is the assignment I was given for a meeting. My manager asked me, post meeting, to writeup a summary about the talking points of the meeting and a brief description about each talking point. While he knew I was capable of simply writing up the talking points, he understood that giving brief descriptions of them all might be out of my knowledge level, being new to the team; so he made sure to let me know that I should try my best to create descriptions and anyone one of the talking points I didn\u2019t feel comfortable writing, I would leave for him to finish. I think that this is a combination of the role-taking and role-making process, as while I was given this important assignment for a significant meeting, he still wants to test my skills and abilities, and establish my role, before moving closer and closer into the routinization phase.<\/p>\n<p>The vision that my manager wants will eventually leave the state of our work environment where there would be routinization, as my manager wants to create an environment where we can all individually work on various projects and work independently. For now, I am learning more and taking in as much as I can, hoping to create a strong leader-member bond.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Reflection 2: Adaptive Leadership<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>According to Northouse, Adaptive Leadership is \u201cabout how leaders encourage people to adapt \u2013 to face and deal with problems, challenges and changes\u201d (Northouse, 257). Understanding my office experience and how it relates and differentiates from Adaptive Leadership, I would say that the general atmosphere of our office is centered around mobilizing us, as interns, to tackle challenges and changes that might occur. The difference is that our manager, the head of operations in our office, is not the one who primarily focuses on encouraging us to tackle challenges. The person who takes on this adaptive leadership approach is our research assistant. While our manager focuses on teaching us lesson and picking us up when we fail, our research assistant demonstrates a lot of adaptive leadership approach, by giving us challenges to face and being determined in teaching us how to overcome these challenges, hoping to prepare us for future positions. For example, our research assistant gave us the task of helping him plan an intern and fellowship fair. He gave us challenging tasks, including creating the flyer for the event and coming up with a list of contacts for the event. The use of adaptive leadership was used through the fact that events can change in inevitable ways. Whether that be if key speakers or organizations who RSVPed cancel close to the event, if the event needs to change days due to inevitable problems, and other ways in which events can change. Throughout this process though, whenever we ran into an inevitable problem, he taught us ways to overcome these issues, through different steps and methods of working around the problem at hand. This use of adaptive leadership allowed us to excel and host an amazing event, which I know will help each one of us adapt in our future positions.<\/p>\n<p>While our research assistant challenges us to deal with changes, he also cares about our own personal lives and uses his adaptive leadership to help us address issues in our own lives. This has really encouraged us to become better individuals and to focus on what changes that we need to better understand ourselves. He specifically uses a lot of the \u201cget on the balcony\u201d approach to our own lives. He encourages us to step out of the current situation we are in a look at the situation as a whole rather than from our perspective. Another technique he uses is that he helps us to differentiate the difference between our technical and adaptive challenges. Finally, he makes sure to regulate distress and help us to ensure that during adaptive challenges that we are not too distressed. Ultimately, he encourages us the most, through work and personal relationships, to effectively use adaptive leadership.<\/p>\n<p>The major difference in my office, other than which leadership uses adaptive leadership, is the use of regulating personal distress and protecting leadership voices from below. While our office is great at some things, others can be improved upon. Specifically, when it comes to their own personal distress, it becomes very clear at times, and could really affect the atmosphere of the office. The other issue, protecting leadership voices from below, can be seen during meetings a noticeable amount. Whenever an intern, who is less inclined to speak their mind, speaks up in less conviction about an idea or plan, it can be hard to be open to their ideas, which can lead to these individual\u2019s ideas being unknown.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Reflection 3: Theory to Practice<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>From my experience working in the Senate Diversity Initiative, I find that situational leadership was very present in my internship program, as in each project that we assigned to the others interns and myself, our leadership would use different styles in order to determine the most effective way to accomplish a task. As interns, we were given a lot of responsibility and freedom in completing tasks, as our office was small and everyone needed to focus on their own work in order for all of us to finish our tasks on time. This means that a lot of the time, our head director would use a directing style r in leading us in completing our tasks. A lot of less formal tasks were our head director giving us a task, showing us the what or how of goal accomplishment of the task, and then we would go out and attempt to complete the task with our head director checking in on us once in a while. It was a lot of directive behavior rather than supportive. In certain situations, though, when there was a big project being discussed, our head director would us the coaching style. For these big projects, he would still have the final say in goal accomplishment, but in these situations, there was a lot of more open discussion and encouragement when giving people tasks. He would ask everyone what they thought and what changes or opinions we have, and then encourage us to make our plans in action and take on these roles. This, I believe, was effective for the given situation because it allowed us to develop better, having to work on our own accord a lot of the time, but didn\u2019t leave us out to dry, meaning that we could increase our commitment to the mission and have an overall increase in interest. This would allow us to move towards moderate to high competence and variable commitment, which allowed us to excel as individuals.<\/p>\n<p>Ways that my internship experience wasn\u2019t similar to situational approach was that there wasn\u2019t a lot of use in supporting or delegating per say. A lot of the time, directive behavior was a necessity in order to complete our tasks and understand what the goal of the task was, meaning that while coaching was more preferred to supporting style, there was still an area of supportive behavior when it came to our leadership. At the same time, delegating style was not necessarily used. While I mentioned that delegating, as a vague term, was used in order to allow us to all complete our tasks, the behavior which was used more was directing, as we never were to complete a task with our own goal accomplishment in mind, as there was specific ways in which our head director wanted us to complete tasks. This shows that while certain leadership styles were used, our leadership did not always use each form of style or behavior in situations that maybe were needed to be used. It can also be said that other interns and my development levels would have increased more had our leadership used all styles and behaviors of leadership. Overall, while not all leadership styles were used, as stated before, I still believe that my leadership was effective in being able to develop others and myself for future positions.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Internship January 2020 &#8211; April 2020 During my time at Senator Schumer&#8217;s office, I was able to gain a lot of experience and knowledge about our political system from the team I worked with. I specifically interned in the Senate Diversity Initiative in Senator Schumer&#8217;s office, where I learned how to be more independent and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2384,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-91","page","type-page","status-publish","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":74,"date":"2020-01-23T02:07:46","date_gmt":"2020-01-23T02:07:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/?page_id=74"},"modified":"2021-04-27T03:05:13","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T03:05:13","slug":"internship-winter-spring-2020-office-of-senator-charles-schumer","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/internship-winter-spring-2020-office-of-senator-charles-schumer\/","title":{"rendered":"Leadership Experiences and Reflections"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Legal Volunteer: Building One Community\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/building1community.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/B1C_logo.png\" alt=\"Image result for building one community\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Community Service<\/p>\n<p>December 2020 &#8211; January 2021<\/p>\n<p>As a legal volunteer for Building One Community, I had the opportunity to learn from the head litigator at the non-profit, as well as volunteers, a lot about our judicial system and how it is conducted. While volunteering, I conducted legal research on immigration laws in order to aid lawyers in working with their clients, organized and drafted legal documents alongside lawyers to help in expediting the process of legalization or obtaining a green card, and developed organization and communication skills while allowing me to become a stronger writing. I was able to grow tremendously as an individual and take on new tasks to help me become more responsible and confident in my abilities.<\/p>\n<p>Reflection:<\/p>\n<p>In the program, I was tasked with providing aid towards the lawyers and volunteers in aiding them in drafting legal documents, conducting research on the various topics they needed information on, and other small tasks that were required of me. I worked here for a month and provided as much aid as I possibly could towards the organization. This program increased my knowledge of leadership through the way in which the lawyers and other volunteers conducted themselves and treated one another. Each individual on the legal team had an important role in the process, and between each member, there did not seem to be such a strict hierarchy of individuals. Instead, the lawyers would work with the volunteers, guided by the head attorney, in a respectful manner. Even when dealing with me, I did not feel as though I was being managed, but rather was an essential part of the team. I think this taught me the importance of enabling followers and providing them the treatment that they deserve, as giving them respect can boost the entire team greatly. This changed my view of leadership because in traditional leadership, there seems to be always someone on top of another person. In this case though, it seemed as though everyone was a leader in their own way, providing information, aid and expertise in their own fashion. Even though there was a technical &#8220;power structure,&#8221; everyone was interested on hearing from everyone and taking a democratic process towards the best possible solution. Ultimately, it taught me that leadership comes in various forms, and providing followers with the opportunities to lead can boost the confidence of a team. One key thing I took away from the program was the amount of effort each individual provided. Everyone was beyond motivated to create change that they were always working towards this goal. It made me realize the importance of being passionate about your work and having respect for the work you do.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Representative: Commission on Prevention of Sexual Assault<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Campus Service<\/p>\n<p>August 2020 &#8211; December 2020<\/p>\n<p>As a representative of the Commission on Prevention of Sexual Assault, I was given the task to communicate with fellow representatives on methods, requirements and potential protocols for organizations and clubs at American University, in regards to sexual assault prevention. As we discussed our thoughts, ideas, and plans, we all worked towards drafting and publishing a document that provided potential steps and recommendations for the American University administration towards the protecting students against sexual assault. In being apart of this commission, I was able to refine my leadership abilities, while also improving my communication and reasoning skills.<\/p>\n<p>Reflection:<\/p>\n<p>This program was based around the sexual assault that had been exposed during the summer of 2020. In response, an AUSG Senator assembled numerous individuals from different organizations to spearhead a commission that worked to prevent further sexual assault. In the program, we would discuss with each other different topics surrounding sexual assault at AU, and then compile ideas and methods of handling the specific issue. The result of the program was a document that gave recommendations to the AU administration of steps they should take in limiting sexual assault. This program increased my knowledge of leadership by teaching me different ways in which people choose to lead and the effectiveness of those methods. In the commission, there were different representatives of different background, meaning that everyone did not have the same leadership method as the next. Some were more democratic, some were more translational, and some were purely straight to the point about their opinions and views. This helped me to recognize and analyze the different styles of leadership and understand how to properly work with these individual&#8217;s leadership styles to properly meet the end goal. This changed my view of leadership because it made me recognize the fact that not all followers are going to follow the leader, even if there is a mutual goal. It is important to learn about each individual followers goals for the team, and use this information to allow them to succeed and achieve their goals. In doing so, there will be an effective result that forms from this leadership. One key take away from this program was the importance of rising up against wrongdoing and supporting individuals who have been neglected or mistreated. It is important to also stand up for what you believe in and use this motivation towards changing the world for the better.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Chapter President: Phi Sigma Kappa<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/4d15vr8jvyd4cxljvoekr211-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/PhiSigCMYK-01.png\" alt=\"Resources - Phi Sigma Kappa\" width=\"379\" height=\"202\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Campus Service<\/p>\n<p>January 2020 &#8211; December 2020<\/p>\n<p>As the President of my fraternity, I had to handle a lot of the administrative work and act as a leader for the rest of my brothers. During my time as President, I was able to manage the fraternity and ensure that each aspects of our chapter were functioning proper. Additionally, I ensured that my executive board members and other brothers in the chapter were meeting the deadlines set out for the work they had done for the chapter. One of the accomplishments that of my time as President is my ability to help the chapter raise over $10,000 for the organizations Homes for Our Troops and Dreams for Kids DC. During this experience, I was able to learn and challenge my leadership abilities, making me a well-rounded leader, and I was able to improve my reasoning and communication skills.<\/p>\n<p>Reflection:<\/p>\n<p>In this program, I was tasked with being the leader of my local chapter and working towards the goal of managing the different mechanisms of this chapter. In accomplishing this, I had to work with my executive board to discuss the different goals we wanted to achieve, the different projects we wanted to accomplish, and the different problems that we might face. Additionally, I was tasked with ensuring that deadlines were met and that chapter members were upholding the values of the grand chapter. This program increased my knowledge because it taught me the importance of being an adaptive leader, while also being democratic. There were many tough moments were important decisions had to be made, and understanding the decisions that would provide the best outcome wasn&#8217;t easy. This helped to learn to be adaptive to the problems that my organization faced, always understanding the alternatives to a problem or decision and using the alternative when necessary. Additionally, by allowing my followers to be apart of major decisions and provide input on a problem, it made it easier to come to the best decision. This programed changed my view of leadership by teaching me the importance of being decisive. As a leader, while it is important to listen to your followers and understand the importance of their opinions, there is also the challenge of making decisions and being confident in those decisions. At first, it was hard to make decisions because of the uncertainty of them, however, as I became more comfortable in the role and more confident in myself, being decisive made it extremely easier to operate the organization. One key take away from the program was that leading is not easy by any measure and that the right decision won&#8217;t always be made, but the importance of leadership is to continue pushing and to never lose faith in your ability to lead. Leading always has ups and downs, but it&#8217;s the ability for a leader to bounce back that defines a leaders true capabilities.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Core Leader: Introduction to Physics<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Campus Service<\/p>\n<p>September 2019 &#8211; December 2019<\/p>\n<p>During my experience as a core leader of the introduction to physics course, I was able to demonstrate my leadership abilities through my ability to guide the students through the course. In my room, I assisted with class lectures, alongside the professor, in order to enable the students to learn the curriculum of the course. In particular, I would answer the questions of students, host office hours to provide these students with help on the course work, and contribute to the discussions in the course to provide clarity of the topics. This position allowed me to extend my leadership abilities, communication skills, and my teaching abilities, which will translate into other positions for the future.<\/p>\n<p>Reflection:<\/p>\n<p>In this program, I was tasked with being the teaching assistant\/core leader for a introduction to physics course. I was asked to provide any aid to the professor during the class, whether that be with any materials or items she needed. Additionally, I was given the opportunity to teach the class certain material and explain to them the importance of the material that I was teaching. Finally, I worked as the leader for the students by providing them with the aid they needed to do well in the course, whether that was through study sessions or personal one-on-one work. This program increased my knowledge of leadership by teaching me the importance being a reliable leader. The course was definitely not easy, so a lot of students would seek my help in order to understand the material better. As a result, I needed to be a dependable leader by ensuring I knew the material well and someone that could relay this information back to the students. In turn, it helped me realize the importance of being reliable and ensuring that your followers can go to you for help. This program changed my view of leadership by teaching me the importance of delegation. In attempting to create the best possible learning environment, I was tasked with doing private work or helping teach the class. In doing so, we were able to properly teach the material and spark the interest of the students. This taught me the importance of spreading out responsibility and relying on others to create the best possible outcome. One take away from this program is that teaching is tough and that teaching other individuals requires the necessary patience to work with them. In leadership, this same patience is required to properly educate and teach followers about certain things, so having this patience towards life and the people we meet in the future is vital.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Legal Volunteer: Building One Community\u00a0 Community Service December 2020 &#8211; January 2021 As a legal volunteer for Building One Community, I had the opportunity to learn from the head litigator at the non-profit, as well as volunteers, a lot about our judicial system and how it is conducted. While volunteering, I conducted legal research on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2384,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-74","page","type-page","status-publish","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/74\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":69,"date":"2019-05-23T21:42:57","date_gmt":"2019-05-23T21:42:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/?page_id=69"},"modified":"2021-04-26T18:17:46","modified_gmt":"2021-04-26T18:17:46","slug":"social-action-project-spring-2019-talk-saves-lives","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/social-action-project-spring-2019-talk-saves-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Action Project: Talk Saves Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-70\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2019\/05\/Picture1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2019\/05\/Picture1-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2019\/05\/Picture1.jpg 741w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-71 alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2019\/05\/Picture2-300x122.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"122\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2019\/05\/Picture2-300x122.png 300w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2019\/05\/Picture2-768x312.png 768w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2019\/05\/Picture2.png 963w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n<h3><u>MENTAL HEALTH EDUCATION AND BACKGROUND<\/u><\/h3>\n<p>Mental Health is a serious issue that affects a large amount of high school and college students. Certain mental health disorders like depression and anxiety cause a student to deal with a variety of negative thoughts and emotions, like feelings of worthlessness, loneliness, intense sadness and more. Mental health problems have been found to cause a students ability to grow academically, socially and psychologically, holding them back from developing properly. Specifically, when looking at education, mental health problems cause a student to suffer drastically in their ability to learn information, retain that information, and then prepare and perform on assignments. This can cause a students grades and GPA to drop dramatically, leading to consequences as severe as suicide. Overall, mental health is a topic that must be focused on in order to help students better deal with their own mental health disorders.<\/p>\n<h3><u>IMPLEMENTATION AND DIRECTION <\/u><\/h3>\n<p>With help from the American University Mental Health Initiative, an on campus mental health group that focuses on solving problems with American University students, we focused on suicide prevention. The reason I decided to take this path is because suicide prevention is one step to helping students deal with their mental illness. Many students who are suicidal are dealing with mental illness, meaning that if we are able to teach students to help their peers with dealing with hardship, then that would be a large step in the right direction. With this new direction in mind, I decided to reach out to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to figure out a way one of their instructors could present for American University students.<\/p>\n<h3><u>MY PROJECT: TALK SAVES LIVES <\/u><\/h3>\n<p>Talk Save Lives is a presentation presented by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention centered around teaching people about the general scope of suicide. Working with instructor Robert Asmar, we got together with American University Students to teach them about suicide, who it affects, what we know about it and what can be done to prevent it. The presentation taught a lot of important information about suicide information and prevention techniques that is not commonly known or taught. The presentation and my project was a success and had a lasting impact on the students that choose to attend the event, allowing them to use and express their new knowledge to help other American University students better understand suicide as well. This is the first time that Talk Save Lives was presented at American University, but hopefully the presentation and my project will start a trend more openly about suicide in a safe environment at American University.<\/p>\n<h3><u>CHALLENGES DURING THE PROCESS<\/u><\/h3>\n<p>Initially, going in a different direction with my project, I had a lot of trouble finding an organization to host an event or presentation on campus that required little to no funding. I first reached out to The National Council for Behavioral Health to present a program they have called National Health First Aid for Higher Education. While this presentation would have been the most ideal, the cost in order to fund the presentation was above the amount that a college student would\u2019ve been able to access. Because of this, I decided to move away from this option. This set me back, as I put a lot of my time and effort into getting that presentation to work. Another problem I had throughout was finding a time that would best work for everyone, as I had multiple groups, including the American University Mental Health Imitative and The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention teams to work out times with, which caused scheduling issues but overall worked out.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>MENTAL HEALTH EDUCATION AND BACKGROUND Mental Health is a serious issue that affects a large amount of high school and college students. Certain mental health disorders like depression and anxiety cause a student to deal with a variety of negative thoughts and emotions, like feelings of worthlessness, loneliness, intense sadness and more. Mental health problems [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2384,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-69","page","type-page","status-publish","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":19,"date":"2017-09-11T14:52:59","date_gmt":"2017-09-11T14:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/spatemplate\/?page_id=19"},"modified":"2021-04-26T19:57:07","modified_gmt":"2021-04-26T19:57:07","slug":"work-sample","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/work-sample\/","title":{"rendered":"Work Sample: Natural Disasters and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Context<\/h3>\n<p>This essay was written for my administrative politics class during the spring semester, 2020. The purpose of our paper was to focus on a topic that was important to public administration and politics, and deduce the quality of the policies in place for that specific policy area. For this paper, I choose to discuss natural disasters and greenhouse gas emissions policy, and analyze the policies in place.<\/p>\n<h2><strong><u>Natural Disasters and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Policy<\/u><\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><strong>Introduction:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The environment that encompasses our world is highly fragile, as serious environmental issues have detrimental effects on the health of our planet. Climate change is one of the major dilemmas regarding current environmental issues, as it has been most prevalent in our society. Climate change is seen through various effects, one of the most devastating being increased severity and emergence of natural disasters. Recent natural disasters in the United States have led to more destruction and turmoil for many communities all over the nation. These enhanced disasters have left many families without homes, local economies in shambles, and greater allocation of disaster relief resources and programs in order to combat the worsening conditions. All of this can be attested to increased greenhouse gas levels throughout history, as with changing culture, markets and economies leading to the further development of technology in all sectors of life and business, a surge in greenhouse gas emissions has caused further problems of natural disasters and climate change.<\/p>\n<p>With growing concern of climate change, natural disaster severity and commonality, and greenhouse gas emissions, the United States has attempted to create public policy in order to reverse the damages of greenhouse gases. With the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 under the Nixon administration, and the creation of state environmental departments, there has been enforcement that has allowed for further initiatives to reverse the effects of greenhouse gas emissions (McVey, 2018). However, even with the greater focus on reversing climate change, the federal and state governments have been highly criticized for their incompetence with rising global climate concerns. Many people and private environmental protection organizations have been highly concerned with the ability of the government to lower emissions of greenhouse gases. Especially with the Environmental Protection Agency losing a significant amount of funding, becoming diluted, and lacking of a central purpose, there is growing concern on the accountability of our government. With this being said, it is important to understand how the effects of greenhouse gases, including natural disaster severity, helps us to observe the current issues of policy and enforcement that has been establish.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Effects of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on Natural Disasters:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Natural disasters, without amplified conditions, are already highly dangerous and extremely concerning to the people affected directly and indirectly by the disaster. With increase in greenhouse gas emissions, there has been evidence that shows this increase as being directly correlated to the increase in more intense natural disasters. According to the Independent Evaluation at Asian Development Bank, it is suggested that climate conditions, including natural disasters, have appeared to become more significant as carbon dioxide accumulation in the<\/p>\n<p>Additionally, with an increase in natural disasters, due to increased greenhouse gas emissions, severity of disasters is another significant issue that has occurred. If natural disasters occur more frequently than ever before, then an issue of severity is highly concerning, as these destructive disasters leave an even greater mark on the communities it ravages. According to an article published by Scientific American, there has been evidence, through recent natural disasters in the United States, that these disasters have been more extreme due to greenhouse gas emissions and worsening conditions of climate change. One natural disaster this is evident by is Hurricane Florence, which hit the Caribbean and both North and South Carolina. While Hurricanes are known to be destructive storms, Hurricane Florence was fueled by the conditions of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. With higher ocean temperatures from climate change, Hurricane Florence grew into a category four storm, one that left the Carolinas with immense amounts of flooding. Another natural disaster that caused a significant amount of turmoil was the scorching heat of the summer of 2018. This summer was exacerbated due to the effects of climate change, as the deterioration of the ozone layer made this summer one of the hottest in recorded history. Not only did this hot summer cause a significant amount of wildfires in California, but also \u201druined crops, boosted toxic algae blooms, shut down nuclear-reactor cooling systems, and triggered blackouts across four continents (Francis, 2019),\u201d showing the impact of severe natural disasters on the United States and the world. (Francis, 2019).climate increases. The Figure above demonstrates this trend, as throughout the years 1970-2013, with the rise of carbon dioxide levels, there has been an increase of disasters relating to hydrometeorological conditions and climatological conditions. This suggests that with the increase in greenhouse gas emissions through these four decades, there has been a correlated trend of increase of natural disaster, both relating to climate conditions and conditions of water and energy in relation to lower atmosphere (Independent Evaluation at Asian Development Bank, 2015). This increase in natural disasters due to increasing greenhouse gas emission levels is a major concern for not only the United States, but the world, as with an increase in natural disaster appearance comes more adversity that is to be faced by communities that are more susceptible to these disasters.<\/p>\n<p>It is clear that with the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, there is more trauma that is experienced all over the United States and the world. The United States, being a major contributor to this issue, has ironically been one of the most affected by increased greenhouse gas emissions. With numerous states having to allocate immense amounts of relief and disaster resources for people who have had their houses burned by wildfires or submerged by flooding, it is clear that the efforts to combat climate change have been ineffective due to the current environment status. Current policy to limit greenhouse gas emissions have shown to be ineffective in preventing worse climate conditions. Thus, greenhouse gas emissions need to be more thoroughly evaluated in order to understand specific policy that could be adapted to minimize the amount of emissions currently in the United States. Without the proper creation, implementation, and enforcement of policy to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, there will continue to be an ever-growing problem of natural disasters due to climate change. Looking at the past and current state of environmental policy gives us this insight to what the current problems of policy are and how we can analyze them in order to suggest changes of current greenhouse gas.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Greenhouse Gas Policy Throughout U.S. History:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>After the start of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, the growth of industry led to a constant increase of greenhouse gases, as the United States passed a significant amount of countries in emissions. As shown in the figure below, the United States quickly rose to one of the top carbon dioxide emitters in the world, showing the need for the creation of greenhouse gas policy in the U.S. (Friedrich and Damassa, 2014).<\/p>\n<p>Policy to combat carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions started in the 1970\u2019s, when the Environmental Protection Agency was created. With the development of the Environmental Protection Agency, a multitude of policy regarding greenhouse gas emissions started to be adopted, in response to the growing concern. Beginning in 1977, President Jimmy Carter started the momentous change for reducing greenhouse gas emissions through the Clean Air Act Amendments. These amendments allowed for the E.P.A. to have access to more power in regulating certain greenhouse gases known as Hazardous Air Pollutants, which not only caused problems to the environment and climate change, but also affected the health of people directly. Following the adaption of these amendments, in 1994, President Bill Clinton mobilized greenhouse gas policy through issuing an executive order \u201cthat all federal agencies prioritized environmental justice for minorities and low income (McVey, 2018)\u201d to prevent the risk of furthered damage to these communities and their exposure to hazardous air pollutants. These are the first two major attempts to combat greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, as the government\u2019s interest in trying to limit climate change was growing immensely. After this, efforts continued to expand, as with the Environment Protection Agency broadening their efforts, they were able to establish monitorization of air quality, especially in areas that had recently been affected by natural disasters. Congress also took action with the creation of committees in both the House and Senate in order to help focus efforts on global warming and climate change. Furthermore, President George Bush, along with the help from Japan, established the Kyoto Protocol, which led to a worldwide effort in order to reduce emissions. Finally, with the lead of President Barack Obama, he attempted to create the Clean Power Plan to coincide with one of the biggest strategies from the federal government in order to combat climate change (McVey, 2018).<\/p>\n<p>State efforts had also been established in order to combat climate change. Specifically, California has been one of the first states to pave the way in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In 2002, the Governor of California established the California Air Resources Board, which \u201cis charged with protecting the public from the harmful effects of air pollution and developing programs and actions to fight climate change (CARB).\u201d This state agency has established in-depth approaches in order attempt to clean the air in California. With these approaches, California has been able to improve their air quality levels in order to prevent health risks to people, analyze the performance of the agency in doing a variety of climate change actions that would reduce greenhouse gases, and overall, establish state efforts to demonstrate initiatives to lower greenhouse gas emissions (CARB). Another state that has taken on similar climate change initiatives was New York. In 2009, with the creation of the New York State Climate Action Council, the council worked in order to protect the climate of New York State. The council has a variety of agencies that works under them, in order to improve greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the council\u2019s efforts led to the signing of the Climate Leaderships and Protection Act, which \u201crequires New York to reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 40% (NYCAC).\u201d This is just one of the examples of how New York State has taken on important initiatives to allow for cleaner air, prevent against the deterioration of the climate, and once again provide for state initiatives that allow for the demonstration of tackling climate change (NYCAC). Other states have taken on initiatives that have allowed for similar effects, meaning that certain state governments have shown their ability to create effective greenhouse gas policy.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Issues with Current U.S. Greenhouse Gas Policy:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>While the United States has had some past success in battling climate change, in recent history, there has seemed to be a lot of problems with greenhouse gas policy. \u00a0While climate change has been highly important in the past, there are concerns of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Trump Administration and certain state governments not taking on the same level of care as former administrations and other state governments. Specifically, there is a lot of skepticism and criticism when discussing the actions of the Environmental Protection Agency. One of the comments that is made about the E.P.A. is that they have failed to properly protect the air quality in the United States. While the agency has made an opposite claim, the actions shown through policy implementation demonstrate the agency\u2019s incompetence. For example, the E.P.A. has cut the standards for car pollution by allowing more cars with inefficient engines, leading to the production of higher levels of greenhouse gases from these inefficient cars. Furthermore, the E.P.A. attempted to limit states from enacting initiatives that increased these standards in their own states, showing how their mission is clouded (The Climate Reality Project, 2019). Additionally, the E.P.A. has been criticized for directly enforcing policy that is in opposition to recent science. When looking at the current state of our environment, there has shown to be a need to shift our focus quickly to tackling climate change, as it is necessary to prevent against irreversible damage to our world. However, the E.P.A. has been acting against this notion, leaving for a lot of questionable actions. For example, the E.P.A. had suggested the repeal of the Clean Power Plan. The Clean Power Plan would\u2019ve prevented against the increasing levels of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, thus not only having a positive effect on our environment, but also allowing for the improvement of the health of millions of Americans (Center for Sustainable Systems at University of Michigan, 2017). With these and other questionable actions from the E.P.A., there is a lack of accountability, leading to a necessity for better performance management from the public. Furthermore, with this carelessness for climate change issues, it presents further issues for the United States for a cleaner environment in the future.<\/p>\n<p>While the E.P.A. is blamed for a lot of these actions that have resulted in a reverting of climate change policy, it is important to look at President Trump\u2019s administration and his outspokenness against climate change focus, showing how the current administration is another huge issue that is highly criticized for climate change problems. Examining the actions of the Trump administration as a whole, a major dilemma that has occurred was the President\u2019s decisions to remove the United States from the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement is a worldly initiative to attempt to reduce the threat of climate change, with almost 200 countries worldwide having signed the agreement. With the withdrawal of the United States from the agreement, the decision is said to have a terrible impact on both the United States and the world\u2019s attempt at combating climate change. With the United States being one of the top polluters in the entire world, President Trump has taken an action that would allow for the United States to continue to pollute at a high rate. Ultimately, this mistake by President Trump and his administration shows a need for proper environmental policy (Blau, 2018). But to say that President Trump has overshadowed the need for greenhouse gas policy would be an overstatement, as the President has made it his mission to reverse the environmental policies established by President Obama. Specifically, President Trump has established numerous executive orders in attempt to limit the costs of President Obama\u2019s environmental initiatives. These executive orders include \u201creducing regulation and controlling regulatory cost (Aldy, 2017),\u201d which limits the abilities of regulatory agencies, including the E.P.A., and ensuring that each agency removed the regulations on climate control and energy that President Obama had created. President Trump\u2019s ultimate goal seems to be to \u201creverse policy progress made under the Obama administration, and remove any regulations that may burden domestic energy development, with a fossil fuel emphasis (Aldy, 2017),\u201d suggesting that President Trump\u2019s focus leads him away from ensuring proper policy for greenhouse gas emissions and protecting the nation from climate change issues like natural disasters. Finally, President Trump\u2019s leadership within the E.P.A. are beyond questionable, as he has assigned numerous people to take charge who do not consider themselves environmentalist, compromising any success the E.P.A. could have established (Aldy, 2017). It is clear that both the E.P.A. and the Trump administration both have very specific roles in reversing the policy against greenhouse gas emissions, as neither have been able to make positive change for the nation.<\/p>\n<p>State governments have also shown their incompetence in creating greenhouse gas policy, as even though certain states have taken initiatives that has greatly improved greenhouse gas emissions, there are still many states that have little policy regarding this issue. In demonstrating this, many states have not adopted any policy on greenhouse gas reduction, including the implementation of carbon pricing policies, energy efficiency policies, transportation policies, and other policies that would greatly affect the current status of climate change in the United States (C2ES). Furthermore, after the President withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, states, on their own accord, showed their support for the agreement. However, only 24 states and Puerto Rico had showed their support, suggesting that 26 states did not<br \/>\nsupport the Paris Agreement and felt that it was unnecessary for them to be a part of the mission.<\/p>\n<p>The figure above shows this majority of states not showing their support for the Paris Agreement, suggesting their disinterest in global climate recovery (Green, 2019). With a majority of states showing their lack of in creating and supporting greenhouse gas policy, that would positively affect the United States and the world, it demonstrates the overall problem with current views on climate change.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Analyzation of Current Greenhouse Gas Policy:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In relation to the various principles of public administration, the United States has not served the essential purpose it has needed to. With issues of accountability and performance management, federal and state governments have a necessity to understand its citizen regarding greenhouse gas policy. When discussing accountability issues, it has been shown through this lack of necessary policy that the government hasn\u2019t been accountable to the people of the United States. This can be attested to a variety of aspects, the first being the need for positive or negative control. The mission of the E.P.A. is beyond blurred, leaving it with incompetent and untrustworthy leadership, and haven committed acts that has questioned the purpose of the agency. The need for further control to ensure the proper direction of policy is critical to the future of our nation\u2019s greenhouse gas emissions policy. Through the use of positive control, which requires agencies to do what they should do, or negative control, which is to prevent agencies from doing what they shouldn\u2019t do, it can help to establish policy by ensuring that the E.P.A. understands it role in enforcing policy that further helps limit greenhouse gas emissions (Kettl, 2018, p. 8). The second aspect that needs to be accounted for is program accountability, as the E.P.A. needs to establish its programs to properly meet its defined purpose. While the E.P.A. claims that is mission is to \u201cprotect human health and the environment (EPA)\u201d, and it states that it claims that \u201cfederal laws protecting human health and the environment are administered and enforced fairly, effectively and as Congress intended (EPA),\u201d a lot of the programs that the E.P.A. has established and enforced have either been unsuccessful or rescinded, showing that its message does not match with the performance of its programs. This entails that program accountability is lackluster and needs to be further enhanced and created more accountable to achieve the purpose of the program and maintain the mission of the E.P.A. (Kettl, 2018, p.16). The third aspect that needs to be accounted for is the debate of leaving administrators accountable for themselves, rather than through the rule of law and legal standards. The Fredrich-Finer Debate issues that administrators should be held accountable, but in different ways in which these individuals believe keeps administrators accountable. Friedrich states that administrators should be able to hold themselves accountable, as the law should not make the job of an administrator inefficient, while Finer states that administrators should not be above the rule of law, and that legal standards should hold these figures accountable (Jackson, 2009). While administrators and officials have been keeping themselves accountable, they have not have had to deal with legal standards regarding environmental issues, so it is important to change this accountability style in order to allow the law to hold these figures and the government accountable. In discussing greenhouse gas policy, the lack of or removal of necessary policy shows that these figures should be held more accountable, beyond themselves, but rather under the law. The final aspect that is to be accounted for are the three themes of public administration: politics, performance and accountability. It is stated that in order to have an effective government, one that is seen by the people as legitimate, all of these themes are to be equally met in order to have a government that is reliable, is able to deliver effectiveness and that their choices are to be made among the values of our nation (Kettl, 2018). It can be said though that the government hasn\u2019t been able to maintain or properly balance these themes, as when referring to greenhouse gas policy, there has been a lack of accountability to create or maintain proper policy, deliver effective policy, or make choices on policy that uphold our values. This suggests questionable behavior from the government, that to many seems unethical and does not allow for the evolution of effective policy of greenhouse gas emissions.<\/p>\n<p>Another way to analyze greenhouse gas policy and the government\u2019s actions is through performance management. Performance management can take on a few forms, one of the most important being citizen feedback. When looking at current citizen feedback on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change issues, it has shown that the majority of Americans are not being represented, as the majority believes that there should be more effective policy to combat greenhouse gas emissions. A lot of citizens feel that it is important to establish policy that will help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to reduce the current issues that are related to climate change. Furthermore, it is shown that the majority of Americans feel as if, at this<br \/>\nmoment, the federal government isn\u2019t doing enough to try to protect the climate.<\/p>\n<p>The figure above shows that 67% of Americans currently believe that not enough is being done to reverse climate change and stop problems like severe natural disaster (Pew Research Center, 2019). This shows that citizen feedback of our governments and agencies isn\u2019t properly taken into account, as administrators are choosing to shape and enforce policy in matters in which they see benefits themselves the most. This is a major problem that the government shouldn\u2019t overlook, as in order to establish effective policy, citizen feedback should be accounted for.<\/p>\n<p>Lastly, while the government is heavily criticized for the lack of effective greenhouse gas policy, it is important to understand the legal issues that arise with the creation of policy. If implementation of policy is presented with legal issues, it can prevent important policy to be fully established. This can be seen with the Clean Power Plan, as with the finalization of the plan set in place, many legal issues arouse on the plan\u2019s constitutionality, regulatory authority and standing with statutory law. These legal issues posed many restrictions to this plan and thus never allowed for it to fully materialize (Koehrer, 2016). Through this, it can be said that the current administration and governments shouldn\u2019t be fully blamed for ineffective policy, as it is hard to make effective policy legal. Nevertheless, the current administration and governments have been removing important greenhouse gas laws that are needed in order to provide for a cleaner future. This shows that while there may be issues with the law, the current administration and government should be blamed for issues of ineffective policy, as there has been questionable actions by our government in deciding policy at the moment.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Conclusion: <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Greenhouse gas policy is necessary for reduction of severe natural disasters and other climate change related issues. However, policy hasn\u2019t been focused on properly, showing how the government hasn\u2019t been as accountable to the people. In order to move beyond this point, two steps need to be taken. This first is that the federal and state governments need to understand the responsibility they hold in determining the future of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. While the government is currently failing to understand the issue at hand, it is their responsibility to take action and ownership for the current failures, in order for greenhouse gas policy to move forward. This ownership will also keep figures of our nation accountable as well, including corporations, who attribute to this problem directly (Cuomo, 2011). The other step that needs to be taken is the implementation and evaluation of policy. Greenhouse gas policy, during the process of creating and implementing, or rescinding, needs to be more thoroughly analyzed in order to understand the importance of that policy. Policy that had been rescinded under the Trump administration were highly important, thus should\u2019ve been more thoroughly analyzed in order to understand the importance of that policy. If these changes can be made, there is a lot of hope for the future of greenhouse gas policy. Ultimately, Natural disasters and other climate change related issues continue to intensify and become worse as this problem continues to exist. If policy that is effective to combat greenhouse gas emissions isn\u2019t established sooner than later, these climate change issues will become an even bigger problem for our nation and the world in the future, thus making it harder to combat. It is important that for the sake of the world, policy is created that will help to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases, in order to prevent natural disasters and other issues to grow into problems that devastate our planet.<\/p>\n<p><u>Sources<\/u><\/p>\n<p>7 Ways U.S. States are Leading Climate Action. (2019, July 8). Retrieved from https:\/\/unfoundation.org\/blog\/post\/7-ways-u-s-states-are-leading-climate-action\/<\/p>\n<p>Aldy, J. E. (2017). Real world headwinds for Trump climate change policy.\u00a0<em>Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/em>,\u00a0<em>73<\/em>(6), 376\u2013381. doi: 10.1080\/00963402.2017.1388673<\/p>\n<p>Blau, J. (2018). Trump Has Committed a Crime Against Humanity.\u00a0<em>Sociological Forum<\/em>,\u00a0<em>33<\/em>(4), 1101\u20131106. doi: 10.1111\/socf.12462<\/p>\n<p>California Air Resources Board. (n.d.). Retrieved from https:\/\/ww2.arb.ca.gov\/our-work<\/p>\n<p>Climate Action Council. (n.d.). Retrieved from https:\/\/www.nysenate.gov\/issues\/climate-action-council<\/p>\n<p>Climate Change: Policy and Mitigation Factsheet. (n.d.). Retrieved from http:\/\/css.umich.edu\/factsheets\/climate-change-policy-and-mitigation-factsheet<\/p>\n<p>Cuomo, C. J. (n.d.). Climate Change, Vulnerability, and Responsibility.\u00a0<em>Responsibility and Identity in Global Justice<\/em>,\u00a0<em>26<\/em>(4), 690\u2013714. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/41328876 Accessed: 22-03-2020 19:00 UTC<\/p>\n<p>Francis, J. (2019, June). Rough Weather Ahead.\u00a0<em>Scientific American<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Friedrich, J., &amp; Damassa, T. (2020, April 8). The History of Carbon Dioxide Emissions. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.wri.org\/blog\/2014\/05\/history-carbon-dioxide-emissions<\/p>\n<p>Funk, C., &amp; Hefferon, M. (2019, December 30). U.S. Public Views on Climate and Energy. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/science\/2019\/11\/25\/u-s-public-views-on-climate-and-energy\/<\/p>\n<p>Jackson, M. (2009). Responsibility versus accountability in the Friedrich\u2010Finer debate.\u00a0<em>Journal of Management History<\/em>,\u00a0<em>15<\/em>(1), 66\u201377. doi: 10.1108\/17511340910921790<\/p>\n<p>Kettl, D. F. (2021).\u00a0<em>Politics of the administrative process<\/em>. Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press, an imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc.<\/p>\n<p>KoehrerOctober, F., Koehrer, F., Koehrer, F., Koehrer, F., Koehrer, F., American Council on Renewable Energy, \u2026 Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. (2018, March 2). Understanding the Legal Challenges to the Clean Power Plan. Retrieved from https:\/\/acore.org\/understanding-legal-challenges-clean-power-plan\/<\/p>\n<p>McVey, M. (2018, July 9). A brief history of the EPA. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.humanitiesebook.org\/a-brief-history-of-the-epa\/<\/p>\n<p>Our Mission and What We Do. (2018, February 7). Retrieved from https:\/\/www.epa.gov\/aboutepa\/our-mission-and-what-we-do<\/p>\n<p>Project, T. C. R. (2019, November 6). Wrong Way at EPA: Three Ways the Agency Is Failing Us. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.climaterealityproject.org\/blog\/wrong-way-epa-three-ways-agency-failing-us<\/p>\n<p>State Climate Policy Maps. (2019, July 10). Retrieved from https:\/\/www.c2es.org\/content\/state-climate-policy\/<\/p>\n<p>Thomas, V., &amp; Lopez, R. (2015).\u00a0<em>Global Increase in Climate-Related Disasters<\/em>. Mandaluyong City: Asian Development Bank.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3>Reflection:<\/h3>\n<p>While the assignment was one that took a lot of time and effort to write, I thoroughly enjoyed writing this piece. The paper, for me, had two beneficial aspects to it: It allowed me to strengthen my research skills and confirmed my interest in politics and the environment. The process of researching this topic and finding the appropriate sources allowed me to strengthen my patience and determination. While I had experience conducting research in the past, this final paper expanded my abilities and challenged me to search more effectively and efficiently for the information to support my argument. While long, I really enjoyed researching this environmental and political topic. I am highly motivated to work towards protecting our environment and maintaining the ecosystems of our planet, so the process of implementing safeguards to do this is through the administration and political process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Context This essay was written for my administrative politics class during the spring semester, 2020. The purpose of our paper was to focus on a topic that was important to public administration and politics, and deduce the quality of the policies in place for that specific policy area. For this paper, I choose to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2384,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-19","page","type-page","status-publish","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":16,"date":"2017-09-11T14:52:59","date_gmt":"2017-09-11T14:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/spatemplate\/?page_id=16"},"modified":"2021-09-23T14:09:59","modified_gmt":"2021-09-23T14:09:59","slug":"about-me","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/","title":{"rendered":"About Me"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-101 \" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2021\/05\/IMG_9574-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"282\" height=\"423\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2021\/05\/IMG_9574-scaled.jpg 1707w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2021\/05\/IMG_9574-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2021\/05\/IMG_9574-683x1024.jpg 683w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2021\/05\/IMG_9574-768x1152.jpg 768w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2021\/05\/IMG_9574-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2021\/05\/IMG_9574-1365x2048.jpg 1365w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 282px) 100vw, 282px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">Hello, My name is Christopher Orjuela. I grew in the suburbs of New York, in a small town called Chappaqua. I am a graduate of American University, where I majored in Political Science and minored in Economics. I currently work at Mowry and Grimson, PLLC, a law firm specializing in international trade law. In the future, I am hoping to attend law school and become a lawyer in the future. I was a member of the class of 2021 School of Public Affairs Leadership Program.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">My job experience includes being a legal assistant at Mowry &amp; Grimson, where I thrive through the development of my interdependence, my organization, communication, and legal skills, and my ability to be responsible. Additionally, being a legislative intern with Senator Charles Schumer&#8217;s office, I learned how to be reliable, accountable, communicative, and comprehensible. With these skills learned and continuously developing, I hope to be able to become an effective and strong lawyer, as well as become a well-rounded individual. My personality and characteristics allow me to stay cool and collected in times of crisis, as I am able to deal with difficult problems efficiently and effectively, without becoming flustered and overwhelmed. While I am easy going, in times where I need to be, I am very hardworking, focused, and can effectively take over and become a leader. Overall, I know how to act in each situation, both in a casual and professional setting. The reason I want to become a lawyer in the future is because I love to argue and fight for what I believe in. I have always been like this, and people who know me understand that I fight for what I believe in. I am also able to do in depth research on any topic I am studying. I am hoping these skills will allow me to succeed, and one day become a lawyer either in the public and private sector.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h4><\/h4>\n<h4><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hello, My name is Christopher Orjuela. I grew in the suburbs of New York, in a small town called Chappaqua. I am a graduate of American University, where I majored in Political Science and minored in Economics. I currently work at Mowry and Grimson, PLLC, a law firm specializing in international trade law. In the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2384,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-16","page","type-page","status-publish","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":13,"date":"2017-09-11T14:52:59","date_gmt":"2017-09-11T14:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/spatemplate\/?page_id=13"},"modified":"2021-09-24T14:46:01","modified_gmt":"2021-09-24T14:46:01","slug":"resume","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/resume\/","title":{"rendered":"Resume"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1 style=\"text-align: center\"><strong>Christopher Orjuela<\/strong><\/h1>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">1209 Hardscrabble Road, Chappaqua, NY 10514 (914)486-0147 * <a href=\"mailto:ctorjuela@gmail.com\">ctorjuela@gmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>EDUCATION<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>American University<\/strong>, School of Public Affairs, Washington, DC<\/p>\n<p>May 2021<\/p>\n<p>Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, Minor in Economics<\/p>\n<p>GPA: 3.65<\/p>\n<p>Honors: Dean\u2019s List (Fall 2018, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021)<\/p>\n<p>Certification: Advanced Leadership Studies<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>EXPERIENCE<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Legal Assistant, <strong>Mowry &amp; Grimson, PLLC, <\/strong>Washington, DC<\/p>\n<p>July 2021 &#8211; Present<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Monitored activity, distributed documents filed, and maintained legal case files in cases concerning the firm\u2019s clients, to aid attorneys in planning and executing further action<\/li>\n<li>Assisted partners, associates, and trade analysts on the formulation of legal documents and the maintenance of administrative systems<\/li>\n<li>Adopted interdependence and personal responsibility skills, while strengthening communication, flexibility, and problem-solving skills, to properly handle workload and expectations<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Legislative Intern, <strong>Office of Senator Charles Schumer<\/strong>, Washington, DC<\/p>\n<p>January 2020 \u2013 April 2020<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Managed the Senate Democratic Diversity Initiative underneath staff members in order to better diversify the positions of staff and interns in each senate office<\/li>\n<li>Planned and Orchestrated diversity related events for staff and interns to have easier access to resources and have the opportunity to learn about the hill from senior staff members<\/li>\n<li>Abetted Staff in research, communication and data science projects pivotal to the function of the office<\/li>\n<li>Expanded teamwork abilities and developed further independence in completing projects<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Core Leader, <strong>Department of Physics<\/strong>, American University<\/p>\n<p>September 2019 \u2013 December 2019<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Assisted with class lectures, alongside the professor, in order to enable the students to learn the curriculum of the introduction to physics course<\/li>\n<li>Aided students who required more attention to the material through study hours, discussion sessions, and answering questions in class<\/li>\n<li>Improved communication skills while strengthening teaching abilities and critical thinking<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Information Technology Intern, <strong>Spectracomm Inc.<\/strong>, New York, NY<\/p>\n<p>May 2018 \u2013 August 2018<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Examined the systems of clients to ensure that essential technological systems were operating properly<\/li>\n<li>Communicated with directors and staff to understand the important technological improvements required<\/li>\n<li>Strengthened communication skills while becoming more knowledgeable in technology<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY SERVICE<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Leadership Student, <strong>SPA Leadership Program<\/strong>, American University<\/p>\n<p>August 2017 \u2013 May 2021<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Studied leadership techniques and styles through leadership theory and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of prominent leaders<\/li>\n<li>Volunteered at the Lutheran Social Services headquarters while creating a campaign that raised over $400 for efforts aiding Refugees<\/li>\n<li>Hosted a presentation run by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention regarding suicide prevention for college students<\/li>\n<li>Developed and strengthened leadership skills while improving communication and reasoning skills<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Representative, <strong>Commission on Prevention of Sexual Assault<\/strong>, American University<\/p>\n<p>August 2020 \u2013 December 2020<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Discussed with fellow representatives about methods, requirements and protocols for American University clubs and organizations regarding the prevention and handling of sexual assault<\/li>\n<li>Organized and designed a report with the recommendations of the commission on potential steps American University clubs and organizations should take to ensure the safety of the community<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Chapter President, <strong>Phi Sigma Kappa<\/strong>, American University<\/p>\n<p>January 2020 \u2013 December 2020<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Managed each component of the fraternity by ensuring each sector was working effectively and meeting deadlines<\/li>\n<li>Sustained clear communication with the Phi Sigma Kappa Grand Chapter and the American University IFC to update both organizations on chapter operations and organization<\/li>\n<li>Orchestrated two philanthropy events that raised over $10,000 for the non-profit organizations Homes for Our Troops and Dreams for Kids DC<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>SKILLS<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Language: Spanish (Intermediate verbal, reading and writing)<\/p>\n<p>Technical: Microsoft Office Applications, Windows Operating Systems, WordPress, RStudio<\/p>\n<p>Social Media: Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1065\/2021\/09\/Resume-New-York.pdf\">Resume New York<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christopher Orjuela 1209 Hardscrabble Road, Chappaqua, NY 10514 (914)486-0147 * ctorjuela@gmail.com EDUCATION American University, School of Public Affairs, Washington, DC May 2021 Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, Minor in Economics GPA: 3.65 Honors: Dean\u2019s List (Fall 2018, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021) Certification: Advanced Leadership Studies &nbsp; EXPERIENCE Legal Assistant, Mowry &amp; Grimson, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2384,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-13","page","type-page","status-publish","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":2,"date":"2017-09-11T14:52:59","date_gmt":"2017-09-11T14:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/spatemplate\/?page_id=2"},"modified":"2017-09-11T14:52:59","modified_gmt":"2017-09-11T14:52:59","slug":"reflections","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/reflections\/","title":{"rendered":"My Reflectioins"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2384,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2","page","type-page","status-publish","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/co9609a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]