Aidan Forberg
Minnesota State University, Mankato
Leadership Competency
Students will utilize personal leadership values and strengths in a team environment toward a common goal.
The RISEbio program at MNSU provides students with opportunities in hands-on scientific research, mentorship, and the chance to live in a learning community their first year. A learning community can provide students with a smoother transition into college and coming in during 2020 would have been difficult without having the help of my learning community peers. During my first year, I lived in Preska with my roommate who would also become my lab partner. The first week of school I met my first friend in the learning community and went to all the group study sessions and events with him. My learning community coordinator (LCC) sought to foster a supportive environment that would help us transition into the busy life of a STEM major. She did this by finding team bonding activities for us, checking in on us through 1:1 meetings, and organizing a volunteer experience through pedal past poverty. She would also sit down with everyone to help us organize our schedule and make sure we knew where our lectures and labs were. As the first year of my college journey concluded, my LLC presented me with the Future Leader Award. At the time I was happy but also questioned what I’d done to deserve such an award. It wasn’t until I reflected on that academic year and engaged in new leadership experiences that I realized what she saw in me.
Aside from what was considered normal for students entering college in a COVID-19 year, there were many instances where adversity knocked at my door. Following my lab partner moving back home and being left alone in the dorms, my friend’s little sister and my oldest cousin had both taken their lives weeks apart. My world had been shaken and I relied on my learning community peers to be my support in a time when social distancing made it difficult to engage with people. After my first semester, I was excited to get into the nitty-gritty of my research and rock out the semester after I learned how to navigate my classes and develop a study routine. In the first week of the second semester, adversity strikes again, this time in the form of a spontaneous pneumothorax. I found myself needing a large lung surgery and two weeks to recover split between the hospital and at home. Missing two weeks of school was unfortunate and I once again had to rely on my peers to help with what I missed and encourage me to not give up. I never considered myself a leader in the learning community until another student came to me with struggles and needed guidance. During the rest of the semester, I was able to help them and together we were able to overcome our hardships and do very well in our classes. Though I completed the StrengthsFinder assessment after my learning community experience, , I can look back and see how my strengths as a learner and achiever influenced my success. As a learner, I tend to take everything in at first and devise a plan to get the best results possible. I noticed some students struggling in Biology and Chemistry and took the initiative to create study guides to help them prepare for exams. Before this experience, my vision of leadership involved someone with confidence who knows how to efficiently get things done and is the loudest in the room. While that definition may be true for some, I have been humbled by the circumstances I faced, and using what I learned to help someone can be equally as powerful and far more fulfilling.
As I continue with my college journey, I hope to involve myself in challenging and rewarding leadership pursuits and when I’m faced with adversity, I will remember what I overcame in my first year of college. Though hardships may look different for some, I know it can be difficult to focus on anything else when it seems like everything around you is falling apart. Having been on both sides, I know that one person asking what’s wrong and doing the simple things can make all the difference. As a doctor, I will routinely see patients on the worst days of their lives. Having the knowledge to diagnose them is one thing, but being more human than machine and listening to what they have to say is equally important. As I embark on the next few years of my college journey, my goal is to become president of a student organization or two. In one of these positions, I will establish the same kind of positive and supportive culture my LCC from RISEbio had made. I hope that my commitment to approaching challenges with empathy, resilience, and kind gestures will resonate with my members and coworkers in the future.
YMCA Big Brother/Sister Program
"I have never done that before, thank you so much!"
The YMCA Brother/Sister Mentoring program creates a unique opportunity for adult mentors to build strong relationships with youth with a focus on strengthening their self-confidence, social and communication skills, and positive school, and home behavior. Mentors are not coaches or teachers but supportive role models who can make all the difference in the life of a kid needing it. Each mentor and mentee are matched based on their interests and the activities they’re involved in. My time as a mentor in this program was filled with laughs, memories, and adventures that my mentee and I will never forget. There are a variety of activities both of us enjoy doing together, such as playing with Legos, building model cars, video games, and nature walks. In addition to these, the Y hosts various events that are designed to help youth stay engaged. For my mentee's birthday, I took him to the "Wow Zone," where he could play laser tag and arcade games. This was a special experience for me since laser tag and arcade games were how I chose to celebrate my birthday when I was young.
This experience had a profound impact on me in many areas of my life and I hope my mentee can say the same. Mentors such as teachers, coaches, teammates, and older siblings have always helped shape my success, and flipping roles to teach someone else valuable life lessons was very fulfilling to me. Naturally, I was intimidated at first and questioned if I had what it took to help a 14-year-old. Ultimately, I tried to be the best friend I could, and the mentoring came naturally. One day that was extremely powerful in this realization came the second month of our match when we went to his favorite restaurant, Taco Bell. He wanted to become more confident in social settings and he told me he was going to go up and order for us. Even though this may seem like a small and routine gesture, it was huge for his social confidence and made him extremely happy. He continued doing stuff outside his comfort zone and I was extremely proud of him when he spoke with the customer service assistant at Pawn America about returning a laptop that he bought that wasn’t working.
My leadership style was useful in motivating my mentee to try again when he got down on himself. In addition, I am very competitive and interacting with my mentee helped me learn to teach and enjoy games instead of competing all the time. I found it helpful for us to be on the same team for video games and activities, so I could maintain a supportive environment. I remember a few weeks into our match we played a videogame and after beating a challenging level he gave me and both my roommates high fives after feeling very accomplished. My mentee made me realize the importance of enjoying the little things in life and being able to de-stress on the weekends allowed me to maintain a good work-life balance. During my time in the Honors program and engaging in this experience, I’ve matured in my leadership skills and realized that different situations require different approaches. My belief system has changed to where collaboration and altruistic endeavors are prioritized. In the past, I wanted to be an alpha leader having my voice heard. This mentoring experience has humbled me, and I have come to realize that my past leadership philosophy isn’t effective in all scenarios. Reflecting on this experience has made me realize what leadership styles I value for myself. I prioritize a leadership style that is affiliative and prioritizes coaching and being patient. Leadership styles that I don’t like to involve coercive behavior and are authoritative.
Going forward, I hope to utilize the knowledge gained from this experience and apply it to many aspects of my life. It is a priority of mine to be more understanding of the different socioeconomic statuses and backgrounds people have and not assume that someone has had the same experience as me. This will help me during my time as a physician and my current position as a nursing assistant in a hospital. Now that I am in my twenties, gaining practice to be an uncle when my siblings have kids or when I am a parent myself is important to me. I hope to join similar programs during my time in medical school and having done this already sets me up for success. By gaining new experiences, I plan to develop my leadership competency further, and having my strong foundation is encouraging that I’ll be successful.
Honors Student Body (HSB)
"Hannah are you drinking cranberry juice in your bed right now!?"
As I tell the students I table too, the Honors Student Body (HSB) is the student-led organization on campus within the Honors program. The role of our group is to plan honors monthly events, participate in tabling, and provide a student perspective to decisions made within the Honors Council. HSB is made of up class representatives, a secretary, a president, and a vice president. We work alongside a graduate assistant and each year new members are elected. During my sophomore and Junior years, I served as my class representative, and I am now the president. During my three years in HSB, I have been around a group that at least partially changed each semester. With this comes a new perspective, group dynamics, and team strengths. Since this group is about dividing and conquering with little time in meetings, individual strengths and weaknesses reflect our group’s success.
The success students have in HSB depends on how their strengths and weaknesses aligned with their position. When students run for an HSB position we try and make sure they know what they are getting into because each role can be different. Being a secretary and taking meeting minutes is something that seems both difficult and time-consuming. Having Marielle these past two years as secretary has been very helpful for the group as she never misses meetings and always sends everything we talked about in a neat and timely fashion. She is a great asset to the team and always has something to contribute to conversation. I can confidently say she will be missed by the group when she graduates this semester. Her biggest strength is in communication, and this heavily aligned with the role of secretary. The only weakness she has is inherent to the position which is that sometimes it can be difficult to stay engaged when you have to type out everything we discuss. The other group position that stands out to me is the first-year representative. This position is always someone new and you never know what you will get as it can be tough to balance your schedule as a freshman. During my sophomore year, our first-year representative couldn’t fully commit to the group with their schedule, and we welcomed Will to take their place. Will did an excellent job and has been involved with HSB ever since. His confidence during tabling and contribution to council meetings stands out to me. Last year our first-year rep was Elena who was very good at planning events and designing flyers for them. Sadly, she isn’t involved in HSB anymore, but her creativity continues to influence me when I design flyers and events. This year we have Klara who is super outgoing and is very connected to the first-year class through the learning community. We have heavily increased our event attendance this year as she is determined to encourage learning community members to come. Ultimately, being a successful first year rep involves being social and showing commitment to the group which was embodied by each of the first-year reps. The biggest weakness within any who becomes class rep is experience. Since the first-year rep is elected during the semester, they are somewhat out of the loop and are also balancing their first year of college. Thus, it is the president and the rest of the groups responsibility to get them up to date and provide an inclusive environment.
Before I entered the role of President, I knew I needed to fill the shoes of the president before me while striving to implement new ideas of my own. Mallory had been the president for two years while I served as a class representative, and I knew analyzing her strengths and weaknesses once I was voted in would help me lead this group. She was a very organized and confident leader who always seemed to have a plan if anything went wrong. However, I do think we could have been a closer group if we had done some team bonding activities outside of meetings. We had a few shy people, and I think this would have helped bring everyone together. Similarly, working with two different graduate assistants has shown me different leadership philosophies from which I can learn. During my sophomore year, we worked with Sammi who was very kind and supported the group well. With Sammi, we were a very close group and she thought it was important for us to have individual goals and enjoy our time in meetings. My two years with Nate have been equally as great and we’ve crushed our group goals with his help. With his background in sports, he strives for better results each year and from the start, he challenged us to be the best we could be. I have learned so much from Mallory, Sammi, and Nate and will try and incorporate a combination of what their strengths are.
Coming into this role, I wanted to respect the traditions established before me while developing new ones, and further develop the honors culture to be more inclusive. With this mission in mind, I developed three goals. The first goal was to continue using our meeting outline which the president before me had established with a few small adjustments around our group. My second goal was to establish an open connection among the group which included group messages and two team bonding activities for us each semester. My final goal was to increase our event attendance by promoting our events on MavLife and MavCentral while getting input from attendees on what we can do to make them more fun.
After the semester I received some feedback from the group about what was going well and what could be done differently. They thought all the events went well and everyone filled up tabling roles fast. This next semester we want to try and collaborate with another RSO and space out the time we have meetings and events by two weeks instead of one. The biggest strength I have seen from our current group is flexibility and being able to adapt. During our January event, we had trivia, and we went through our planned content very fast and were able to improvise and find some enjoyable games online. Despite having to come up with stuff on the fly it was one of the most enjoyable honors events of which I have been a part.
In one semester we have achieved most of my goals and the goals we set together at the beginning of the year. The main thing I would like to work on however is communication between club members about if they can’t attend events and meetings, along with the possibility of shifting days to accommodate. Addressing this at the start sets that expectation and will allow for continuity between semesters and in years to come. An aspect of my leadership style that I’d like to improve is making some decisions without needing to appease everyone. Sometimes I find myself needing everyone’s approval before a decision can be made when it’s best to decide quickly and move forward. This is something I can attribute to my futuristic and focused strengths from my StrengthsFinder inventory. These are both good strengths but sometimes together they can cause you to think too much about the future instead of the now.
As my tenure as HSB president ends, I aspire to leave behind a legacy marked by a positive impact on the students and the program. Each of my leadership experiences has required me to adapt to different circumstances and their need for different approaches remains true. As mentioned in my developmental reflection, I wanted to be the president of a student organization since Honors 201, and I am happy to have accomplished that goal. I proved to myself that I enjoy the role and would like a similar responsibility in the future. This could look similar or different in medical school but regardless of my position, I will keep three rules I’ve made for myself in mind. The first thing is that I don’t know what someone else is going through so it’s important to treat everyone kindly, because I never know when I’ll will be in their position. The second is to be willing to mentor someone no matter how big or small of a role it may be. The third and final rule I have is to make one impactful difference in anything I’m a part of, so it is better than when I joined.
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