My junior year of college, I served as the President of the Honors Student Body (HSB), a Recognized Student Organization (RSO) within the Honors Program at Minnesota State University Mankato. While in this position, I worked with a group of six Honors students who held the following leadership roles within our organization: Vice President (1), Secretary (1), and Class Representatives (4). Together, we formed the Honors Student Body and our role was to represent and advocate for the rest of the Honors student body within the Honors Program, our campus, and the Mankato community. As President of this organization, I was responsible for scheduling and organizing meetings, maintaining communication among all parties involved, and ensuring that the duties of the Honors Student Body were being performed. I was also responsible for attending monthly meetings with the Honors Council Committee and acting as the representative of the Honors Student Body among them.

 

Serving as the President of the Honors Student Body allowed me to meet Level 3 of the Teams section in the Leadership competency, because it allowed me to reflect on the different roles within a team setting. Although as the President of this organization, I was usually the primary decision-maker of our group, everyone in our group had their own set of tasks for which they were responsible. For example, while I was busy leading the discussions between our members during our biweekly meetings, our Secretary was tracking down the talking points of our meeting and writing them in a document which she would email to us once the meeting was adjourned. At the same time, our Vice President was responsible for managing the scheduling of our upcoming events while our Class Representatives wrote down the talking points that addressed their constituents and communicated these with them afterwards. These roles within our team allowed us to be collaborative, productive and efficient with our time. Similar roles where, also, noticeable when looking at the wider spectrum of our program and working with the other subgroups that made up the Honors Program (i.e. Learning Communities, Honors Council Committee).  Although we all fell under the same “umbrella” and would constantly collaborate with each other, each of us had different roles that addressed different areas of the Honors Program which only helped strengthen us and make us better as a whole. 

 

This experience taught me a lot about collaboration and delegation of tasks when working in a team setting. This will be applicable when working with other teachers in my school and district as a future music educator. In the future, I am hoping to learn how to better apply these concepts in a classroom setting.

 

Below is a picture of the 2017-2018 Honors Student Body leadership board, from left to right: Sean Thomas, Hunter Herber, Katelynn Malecha, Ana Leyva (myself), Melanie Bengston, and Amber Chrischilles.  I also attached minutes from one of our last board meetings.