By Angie Fike
As a leader at Berkeley High, I define leadership as an opportunity to channel feelings about the school into action that will positively change the school environment. I look at it as an opportunity to listen to the voices of our school and exhibit dedication in accomplishing what we decide to. It is an opportunity to develop a strong team with mutual respect and mutual drive to better our school. I believe that a key component of being a leader at BHS is to hold yourself and others to a high standard — to constantly be assessing our actions and setting goals to be the best we possibly can be. One quote about leadership that I like is something John F. Kennedy said: “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” I believe that if you want to be a leader, a big part of it is learning and being open to improvement and growth. It is learning how to successfully work with others. With BHS leadership, I look at it as being fundamentally a leadership team rather than just a few leaders. What makes us leaders is that we have a common goal to make decisions that will benefit not only us, but the student body who we represent. I also think a big part of leadership is learning skills such as public speaking and writing, group organization, and how to communicate both with administration and the student body. In the future, I think it would be really cool to practice public speaking maybe through workshops or something because it’s something I would love to work on and that I think everyone in leadership could benefit from.
I observed that being on leadership, the size of the school definitely feels even bigger as we grapple with how to have communication not only within leadership but among the school as a whole. I observed that being on leadership definitely helped me feel more connected and involved in BHS. It made me feel empowered to implement ideas into action. At the same time, I experienced how it can be a little slow going in terms of getting things done and how important it is to establish strong communication and organization within our weekly meetings or else we won’t plan anything. We are all really busy and having meetings only once a week made it harder to feel really driven or engaged as a team. Also, the task of fundraising sometimes got in the way of other ideas we had, which is probably unavoidable as fundraising is definitely necessary part of our commitments. I also observed that once we took action (selling food at a sports game, putting up posters, organizing the talent show), everyone felt a lot more invested in leadership. I think this can be translated to other parts of people’s lives as often money is an obstacle, other commitments are obstacles. Both outside of leadership and outside of school, I definitely experience this same feeling that once I feel involved or impactful in something, I am more engaged in it and am driven to continue being involved. Overall, a central goal of leadership is to establish strong communication and to set goals so that we can accomplish what we would like to, and to experience the feeling of having a positive, real impact on the school.