Building Leadership

Catalog description

This course will build students' personal leadership skills by helping them to kick-start a venture that they are passionate about. Ideas could range from a non-profit to help provide tutoring skills to local under-represented youth, to designing a product that could be launched on a crowdsourcing platform to creating a movement to drive more minority representation in books/media. Students must bring their own idea for their project and as we work to build it out, they will develop the leadership skills needed to bring it to life (e.g., networking, harnessing an ecosystem, building out a project plan). Lectures will be a mix lessons on real-world skill building (e.g., for networking - where to start, who to contact) with activities that will be specifically applied to the student's venture. In addition, guest lecturers will be brought in so that students can learn from their leadership journeys. Students will also be paired with mentors to act as a sounding board and there will be weekly in-class discussions on their projects so that students can push each other as well - similar to how CEO roundtables work. At the end of this course, the goal will be to build enough momentum that students can take their project and continue to build it outside of class. Students will also be pushed to "think big" so that their ideas from just a passion project to something that will have an impact. Prerequisite: Idea for the Passion Project that you want to build and Permission of the instructor.