Sandy's Leadership Portfolio

I. I-Programs
Imprint

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I attended the Imprint program in my Freshman year. It is an all-day conference that provides us with abundant networking opportunities with coaches and alumni. Imprint focuses on transitional development skills and has guided me in managing professional and personal transitions. I utilized my social networking skill to build sustainable relationship with the professionals. During the conference, I also learned from those alumni of how to develop others and engage in lifelong learning. This I-program has broadened my horizon and gave me an insight of living in a diverse world creates obstacles and opportunities.

Rick Cavenaugh, the current president of Stoneleigh Companies, was the keynote speaker for this event. I was deeply impressed by his unique leadership style and the way he made an impact on the university. Sitting on a table with several other participants, I recalled clearly that our coach has shared his experience of an influential transition in life and how he made himself through it. From my coach’s personal example, I learned that winner of a transition would not fear new challenges, but be prepared for them. We may all encounter denial or resistance when facing a big change in life. However, staying connected with friends and family and being respectful will help motivate people through transitions. As for me, I had just experienced a huge transition in life at that time—coming to the US for college. It was a completely new environment for me: new people, new language and even new living habits, etc. This program has taught me a way to appreciate life as it is.



Integrity

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  Integrity is the second workshop I attended after Imprint. During the conference, I learned how to investigate my personal values and ethics. “Honesty, Fairness, Achievement and Concern for Others” are the four core values about ethical behavior in a work environment. I gained more self-awareness and by recognizing personal values through the survey. The results showed that I scored lowest on Fairness and highest on Concern for Others, indicating that I prioritize Concern as the most important core value. By working with a group of students, I developed my personal integrity-directed vision statement. I also recognized how integrity affects personal credibility as a leader. By analyzing several ethical case studies, I gained more understanding about the importance of work ethics in the job search and internship examples.

After the conference, I reflected a lot of ethical dilemma situations that I have encountered and how I should have solved them with the stuff I learned. Integrity is not just what people talk about, but really something that needs practice. My goal after the Integrity program is to develop and enhance my Fairness value, both in daily life and at work. For example, once I incidentally dropped my roommate’s toothbrush into the toilette. I had two solutions: pretend nothing happened and flush it away; or tell her the truth and buy her a new one. Choosing the first one will save me time and money, and if I didn’t tell my roommate would never know it. However, here is when integrity kicked into place. I myself was disgusted by the brush and I did not want someone else to do the same thing for me without knowing the truth. In a second I threw the dirty toothbrush away without hesitation. When my roommate got home, I told her about the incident and handed her a new one I just bought from the shop. This little story was no big deal to many people, but I have learned what integrity means and how to correctly interpret the idea into daily life.  

Integrity also played an important role in the professional environment. During a job search, we all want ourselves stand out by maximizing our capabilities. However, what is the right way to distinguish you from a massive group of applicants? A lot people chose to exaggerate their resumes by making up fancy experiences they had never done. A good resume may get you into an interview, or even bring you an offer. However, once you enter the company and the supervisor want you to do the job listed on your skills column, how will you be able to perform the task with the skills you had never learned before? This is the adverse effect of not being honest in the first place. You may get a warning, or being fired. Thinking about the benefits and costs of engaging in dishonest behaviors, you would never have a second thought but stay true and responsible for your own behavior.






Insight

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Insight is an overnight conference where I have built self-assessment skills and learned how to better understand myself. During this overnight conference, I created a plan for self-improvement based on my ECI-U results. After discussing with group members, I realized that analytical thinking is my biggest strength; however, I always underestimated my strengths, causing me to have a low self-confidence.

In my opinion, this assessment result reflects to a large extent my true personalities. In my mind, life is limited and we should spend more time doing things we truly like or meaningful. I joined the club I like; I hang out with friends I feel comfortable with; I do things actively; I work part-time for dining service joyfully. In this way, I always feel motivated and enthusiastic. And once I made up my mind to start a new thing, I would stick with it no matter how difficult it might turn out. However, being relatively low in self-confidence may have something to do with the foreign environment I am in. After all, English is my second language, sometimes I feel limited to fully express myself and opportunities just easily flew away. I was quite a shy person when I first came here. But after one year and a half, I feel I gained a lot of self-confidence.

Also through group discussion, I learned that I am not quite an authoritative leader to others. I prefer a mild style of leading. I pursue a friendly and close relationship with my members. I take care of their needs and I am sensitive on their emotional changes. I like to influence others with my personality, but not position or authority. For example, when I was leading my I-Help volunteering team, I tended to listen to my members’ opinions of where to go and what they were willing to do. However, I also feel that being more of a relationship leader is too weak to have corrective impact on mistakes. And it is not very effective to get things done on time.

               After the two-day conference, I was clear that I need to do two things to improve my task behaviors. One is to define role responsibilities and individual plans clearly for each group member, so that there won’t be free ride for anybody in the team. And we can attain the goal more efficiently. The second thing I need to do is to improve my self-confidence by challenging myself more at the public places.  






Intersect

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Intersect is my favorite I-program among the four. This program is about relationship building, communication skills, ethical practices and team. I had a lot of fun in this program by interacting with our team. We named it “Tiger” because last year was the year of Tiger in China. What makes this Intersect special is that there was no lectures or presentations, but tons of group activities going on. I met my best friends in this conference and became acquainted with other new people. One thing I remembered clearly is that each group was required to build a catapult with limited materials. The results turned out to be so many different shapes of catapults with funny looks. Using our imagination, our group interacted effectively and made full use of the material we had. During the competition, we scored three bullets. At the end of the day, I was able to walk away with improved networking ability.

At the beginning of the program, I knew nobody in my team and was a little too shy to speak. However, after we made our ground rules, our group decided to reward people with highest participation rate and punish the one who is the least active. This created an incentive for everyone to not only participate, but try to be more active. During our group brainstorming section, each of us came up with different ideas. When interacting with other members, I realized how important the Emotional Intelligence is. In terms of success in the workplace, Emotional Intelligence is considered twice as important. The ability of handling interpersonal relationships among people with lower, higher or same level with you makes you a well-rounded person in a firm. Thus, compared to a person’s IQ, Emotional Intelligence is the key to a successful competent leader.

My goal after Intersect is to improve my Emotional Intelligence. Open communication is the best method to settle conflicts and resolve misunderstandings. Once I was in a group project in a accounting class. One of the members never replies to any emails or phone calls. He even hardly came to class. After we realized the free-rider problem, other people suggest that we go to the professor and kick him out of the group. However, I feel we need to talk to that member first to see if there was any misunderstanding. Therefore, I initiated the conversation with him and he told us he was only taking the accounting class as an elective because he was a engineering major. Through effective communications with him, I found out that the problem was the our goals differ. As a business major student, we care much more than an engineering student in the class. But he ended up agreeing on putting more efforts to the group project and he actually did a good job. In a word, through good communications, we can solve the trouble much more easily.   





 II. Academic Courses

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AGED 260— Prof. Lisa Burgoon

Lisa Burgoon has been a brilliant teacher on the leadership field. She guided me into the in-depth analysis of different leadership approaches. From AGED 260, I have gained a better understanding of myself and find a style that fits me. I believe this leadership class has not only helped me recognize my strengths and weaknesses, but has also encouraged me to continue to develop my leadership skills in the future.

As I learned in this class, people are not born to be leaders. Leadership is universal that can be learned and practiced by each one of the individuals. I have learned nine major leadership approaches and theories in this class. They are Trait Approach, Core Value, Skills Approach, Style Approach, Situational Approach, Emotional Intelligence, Path-Goal Theory, Transformational Approach and Multicultural Competence. 

The trait approach states that leadership is the inborn and special characteristics that a certain individuals possess to distinguish themselves from non-leaders.Core values refer to the most important guides and beliefs that motive one’s decision and actions. Skills approach states from a leader-centered perspective that leadership is the ability to use one’s knowledge and competencies to achieve the positive goal. Style Approach focuses on the two general behaviors of the leader: task behaviors and relationship behaviors. It is trying to explain how leaders influence their subordinates with these two behaviors in order to make an achievement.

Understanding the nice theories enables me to view leadership from a more thorough and comprehensive perspective. These approaches all describe leadership distinctively, but what they agree in common is that leadership is the process of one person influencing a group of people to achieve a common goal. They help me understand what skills I lack, what traits are good, what core values I need to maintain and what style to use under different situations. I realized the importance of diversity and emotional intelligence in leadership development. In order to be a successful leader, not only do I need to improve my skills from inside, I also need to adapt my styles and behaviors to meet the needs of followers and task characteristics.

BADM 310— Prof. Gregory Love

I took the business management and organizational behavior class as another leadership class. I learned different things from the AGED 260 class. During the big lecture, I gained in-depth knowledge about the general analysis of management and organizational behavior from a systems point of view. I learned about different organizational structures including customer based, product based, geographical based and functional based structures that most businesses are using. Other organizational theories such as centralization and decentralization in different types of business are also practical.  Professor Love also gave many interesting videos in class to vividly show us various organizational behaviors and management science. He gave out real-world examples to make me have a better idea of the business models have developed and improved throughout history. There were also a lot of psychology theories involved in this class, which made it more than pure business.

Overall, after taking this class, I had a better understanding about basic business structures, environmental forces, planning, organizing, and control processes. Motivation, incentives, leadership and communication are also cultivated in the class discussion.

III. Extracurricular Activities

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French Study-abroad Experience

Paris is an amazing city. After stayed there for almost four months, I already fell in love with the romance and beauty of Paris. There are so many famous attractions to visit in the city, like the Eiffel Tower, the Notre Dame, and the Champs-Elysee, etc.

I chose to study abroad in France in fall 2010, where I enhanced my adaptability and reflection skills. I had many sweet and rewarding moments with my French homestay family, who not only took great care of my daily life, but also taught me the language and culture. I lived with a traditional French family in 17 arrondisement.

I learned the French way of humor and quickly adjusted myself to the new environment. I interacted with peers from more than 70 countries and learned to appreciate the culture diversity. Besides, I was able to balance my work & travel time. I prioritized my time for study first and scheduled the rest time for trip planning. Together with my friends I met in Paris, we spent two months travelling to more than 14 countries in Europe.

Biz-China--RSO


Being an outgoing and energetic student, I have been actively participated in various kinds of extracurricular activities on campus. Together with my close friends, we founded our own RSO called “BizChina” in year 2009. Serving as treasurer, VP-international consequently has proven my ability to lead effectively and motivate people to achieve desirable goals. With “BizChina”, I coordinated with our college dean in organizing business honor students trip to Beijing in the summer 2009 and arranged company visits for 50 members. I also initiated the Chinese tutor program in BizChina and saw many members become good friends out of it.

Beta Alpha Psi; Illinois Business Conculting


I am also a good team member as in the Beta Alpha Psi media committee. I helped this business honor society with marketing and promotion events, and am responsible to design organizational documents. I joined the Illinois Business Consulting this semester and will begin my consulting project in fall.