Self-Growth Reflection
Throughout this past academic year, I have experienced more self-growth as a leader, and even as a person, than I would have ever thought. With the unprecedented times of COVID-19, I had expectations that my leadership development would be hindered, rather than what I was to expect coming into my first-year at university. In light of these unusual times, however, such circumstances only encouraged my growth as a leader, not hindered. Through my persistence and willingness to learn, I have strengthened my skills in active listening, decision-making, and both team and relationship building. However, this process of self-growth did not come easy, for this leadership development involved making mistakes and enduring failures along the way.
By both acknowledging and reflecting from my leadership development experiences endured this past academic year, including the skills that I have personally advanced in, I can now use this transferable knowledge and experiential learning to other activities and projects both in and out of university. From this past year’s experience, I can say with confidence that, with every new academic year, I will surely continue to acquire new ways of thinking and leadership skills to become the best that I can be. Therefore, I can continue to persist in light of unprecedented challenges, learn from other student leaders, and inspire those in the AU community who wish to make as great of an impact as I do.
Team Dynamics Reflection
Due to the circumstances brought by COVID-19, our group could not do everything that we wanted in our social action project. Despite this setback, however, our team has accommodated for our “new-normal” by seeking innovative project ideas to make an impact in the D.C. area. From the start of the Fall 2021 semester, our team knew that we had to be flexible, trust-worthy, and understanding of each other to be the best team that we could be. With this achieved, our team was able to effectively contribute ideas that were highly beneficial to the development and implementation of our project.
That all being said, our team dynamics throughout the course of our project implementation, overall, worked very smoothly. We all spoke respectfully to each other, and always listened when someone had something to say. While are team was working well with each other, I would note that we did experience some turbulence when project coordination came down to communication. For instance: our team worked like a well-oiled machine when we communicated effectively – project plans would be organized, little to no confusion would occur, and we would be able to achieve our short-run project goals earlier than planned. However, on occasions when we experienced miscommunications, both the cognitive and project-work flow would become mildly disordered.
In spite of our ups-and-downs, though, I am glad to say that our team recognized any sorts of problems that came our way, and corrected ourselves to continue moving forward with our project objectives. Through this unusual academic year, it just comes to show that our team truly bonded and became more than a team – we became good friends, a family that won’t ever be out of reach with one another.