Working as a subcontractor was my first professional taste at independent work. I was delegated tasks, supplies, and a team to take on projects ranging from boardwalk refurbishment to office building cleaning.

Over time, I began gaining more responsibility. Eventually, I was surveying communities for issues that could be fixed, creating financial plans for each project, and building teams to work towards the solution.

My time with Sunband taught me how to work efficiently with others while gaining hands-on leadership experience.

After an application process, I was selected as the single nominee to represent my chapter at a nationwide fraternity leadership convention.

My time was spent speaking about personal development and awareness, citizenship and community, and elements of leadership.

Serving as a teaching assistant in my neuroscience laboratory was my first in-class leadership role. I spent class-time helping prepare labs and assist students in their laboratory techniques.

Outside of class, I provided ample aid for students completing lab reports with topics including clinical motor testing, visuomotor adaptation, stress response, brain-computer interfaces, chemical control of behavior, and cognitive enhancement.

There was a 20.0% increase in the percentage of enrolled students achieving an A overall compared to previous semesters.

After scoring well in biochemistry as a student and in my MCAT preparation, I offered my time as a teaching assistant to share resources, study tools, and any knowledge necessary for students in the class. This manifested into answering questions in lectures, grading assignments, and hosting weekly office hours.

This experience taught me how to share knowledge with students of differing education levels. Helping students one-on-one, I would gauge their current level of understanding, where flaws in their current thinking are, and how to guide them to find the solution themselves. There was a learning curve when fighting the urge to simply help students in the quickest and easiest way possible.

Lead for Good was a newly offered program centered around creating positive sustainable change in the areas of physical and mental health. To do so, small groups of students were given free rein over how they wanted to give back to the Virginia Tech community. My group’s final product, termed “Individualized Health,” allowed incoming students to select an aspect of health that they wished to improve within themselves. With selections being physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, and/or intellectual health, users would then see all of the university’s resources related to their goal. Having wished this tool existed as an incoming freshman, it was gratifying to be involved in it’s creation.