LEADER Project

Now that I have recruitment settled, it's time to get back to school and extracurriculars. In particular, one project that I'm very excited about is LEADER (http://www.leaderproject.com/) It's a student-driven initiative where volunteers will teach business skills to students and entrepreneurs in the newly developing economies of Eastern Europe and Russia.

This program is actually one of the factors that I chose Ivey, so I was quite anxious about the interview process as there are only a few spots available. I have experience in teaching / tutoring, and loves to travel - so the combination seemed to be a great fit for projects like LEADER. During the interview, I was asked questions to determine fit and judgement, and a case-teaching portion to demonstrate my abilities. Despite extensive preparation to teach the case, the interviewers threw in some curve balls, which shortened the section I was able to teach. Luckily, I was able to teach some key aspects of the case, so I was selected as part of the team.

November is when LEADER will kick into high gear, where I'm part of the curriculum team. We'll be looking at the existing course material, identify gaps in understanding / knowledge, and finding new cases that could demonstrate the missing concepts. I'm actually quite looking forward on this as I had extensive experience with tutoring one-on-one, but less so in preparing class material where LEADERites will be delivering to a classroom-full of students.

Since this is a non-profit student-run initiative, we need to do a fair bit of fundraising. So part two of this is to figure out how we'll be able to get there and back!