Leadership & Service Overview
The experiences I gained from leadership positions in student organizations during graduate school were as much a part of my education as my research. They allowed me to apply the analytical skills that I developed in graduate school to non-scientific problems in order to impact people more directly. I found ways to engage the communities that surround me through my volunteer work. Those experiences shifted my goals from wanting to enter academia to wanting to enter the public sector in order to put research into action. Later in Sacramento I served on a boards in order to continue to mentor others and to help run a local progressive leadership institute.
2017-2018 Board of NLC-Sacramento.
New Leaders Council
The New Leaders Council (NLC) is a nonprofit with the mission to train the next generation of progressive leaders. Each year NLC runs six month long progressive leadership institutes across the country. I was selected to be part of the 2016 NLC Sacramento fellows class and later served on the board.
Adapted from wikipedia.
Board of Trustees
I was competitively selected to represent the over 9,000 Stanford graduate students on the Board of Trustees Committee on Academic Planning, Policy and Management.
Sometimes leadership involves animal hats.
Stanford Outdoors
I served over 300 hours as president of an umbrella organization for seven outdoor clubs at Stanford University during a year of transition for the clubs.
Students from the East Palo Alto Charter school play with tricks in visual perception at the Exploratorium.
Science Bus
I served as a co-president of a science outreach organization. With the help of other tutors we implemented multiple changes to redesign how both the volunteers and elementary school students experienced the after-school program. We came up with specific issues and approaches for addressing them while managing over 1000 volunteer hours.
Stanford Clark Center from Panoramio. The Clark Center was built to encourage interdisciplinary research.
Mini-Courses
Stanford decided to pilot mini-courses to better prepare graduate students for both academic and non-academic careers. I served as a graduate student representative for my department to provide student in-put into the training that we felt was needed.
From Adventures in Caring. The photo is of volunteer alumni.
Raggedy Anne
The goal of Adventures in Caring is to provide company to patients in hospitals. We dressed up as Raggedy Anne or Andy dolls to provide a figure that represented love and acceptance.