By Solomon Chang
As a leader at Berkeley High, I define leadership not as necessarily leading a group of people, but as representing that group of peoples’ thoughts and being a catalyst for any concerns they bring up. These people for me were the freshman class, the class of 2019. As a leader you have to make sure that the group you were selected to lead is taken care of. Leadership is a platform where people who are driven to make this campus better for their class, have a higher chance of doing so. This is because it holds many people who share the same view as me; that by being together we have the power to take people’s thoughts and make them real, giving everyone a say in the place they spend a good deal of their current lives in.
As a leader this year, I learned that leadership is a lot about communication. Either between me and my class team, our class team and Mr. V, students and our class team, communication is key to running an efficient and functioning leadership unit. I observed our class team in the meetings and found that our most successful meetings were when everyone was on board a hundred percent with the idea. In the month of February, our class meetings were very unorganized because of the lack of communication between all the people on the team. When we failed to reach the ticket limit for the Spring Dance we were organizing, I was able to get that it was because of the communication or lack thereof, that could have gave us an extra week to promote and sell tickets. In upcoming events, as a freshman leadership team, we will change to be more unified behind ideas so that we can use our power to make the school experience better for our peers. Communication and building bonds are helpful tools to have, in and outside of school. The most successful people know how to connect with other people that will help them move up in the world. The same goes with leadership, if we can build bonds with each other, we can truly work as a solid team to take on this school’s big issues, which there are certainly a multitude of. Being a leader means taking initiative, seeing what has to be done, seeing what people want to be done, and doing it. And if we’re successful with this we’ll be successful with making people a little bit happier; win-win.