My Worst Leadership Experience At The Brilliant Solutions Club

Through the various leadership roles within the past few years, my worst leadership experience would be a disastrous meeting of the Brilliant Solutions club that I led during my sophomore year. Brilliant Solutions (or “BS Club”), founded by my friend, Haley, is a club designated to promote critical thinking skills, practice public speaking, and find learning strategies, and do logical-thinking puzzles. When I was asked to be the Vice President, I happily agreed, since this was something I was interested in. When meetings for the club began, it was clear that Haley was mostly in charge of the club: she led the meetings, and created the lesson plans, while the officers and I mostly took care of the logistical tasks, such as signing forms,

For that meeting, I created the lesson and planned out some activities we could do.

However, the club meeting didn’t go as smoothly as I envisioned it to be. While Haley typically had the attention of all the members, when I spoke it was clear that most of our club was uninterested in what I had to say or wasn't paying attention; I didn’t receive the same respect as Haley did. In addition, our club advisor’s room had more students inside than usual, taking tests and asking questions, making the classroom incredibly chaotic and loud, exacerbating the lack of control I had. From that experience, I learned the importance of being able to communicate effectively to a large group, and found that raising your voice is necessary in some situations, as it was during this meeting. During following meetings I led, everything went a lot more smoothly, and I had more control over the situation. Despite that one horrendous meeting, I was re-elected for Vice President for a second term for my Junior

Of the schools I visited, one of the best leadership moments I experienced was visiting my old elementary school from kindergarten to second grade, Cubberley Elementary School. It was a small school, and due to budget cuts, it had greatly reduced in size and faculty since I last attended as a seven-year-old. This school stood out to me, not only because I attended it, but because I wanted to offer the children the same inspiring learning experiences as I once did. Although the school and classrooms did have recycling bins, I found that many of the students/families didn’t recycle at home, or had confusion about what to recycle. It filled me with great pleasure to educate the students on how to recycle, and watch the teachers smile with satisfaction. However, I had doubts about the success of the implementation of our presentation. The following week, I returned to Cubberley Elementary to speak with the classrooms and introduce the recycling contest to the children, and to my surprise, a majority of them remembered the presentation that I gave, excited to see me