Leadership

Page last updated on 5/31/2021

All throughout my career as a student, I've found that I tend to gravitate towards leadership positions. Whether it be for small group projects or for large clubs, I have plenty of experience leading. I was an officer in my high school's Technology Student Associaton club (TSA) for four years, serving as Vice President and then President in my upper classmen years. As President of the club, I set the agenda for each of our general club meetings and officer only meetings, and gave instructions to each of my fellow officers on running different aspects of the club. As President, I organized several game nights at the school to raise money for the club, as well as several community service projects to get us involved in the local community (one of which is listed below). Hosting these fundraisers and community service projects was essential for helping the general club members do well in their TSA competitions, as it costed money to compete and all participants were required to demonstrate leadership experience. At George Mason University, I served as "Programming Director" of the Game Analysis and Design Interest Group (GADIG) for two semesters, where I led a team of approximately 12 programmers and worked with other teams (art team, sound team, design team) in the creation of two different games. Leading these games' development was not trivial, as about half of the programmers had never used Git, C#, and Unity before, all of which I had to introduce them to. I was solely responsible for managing the master branch and merging team members' work, which was intimidating at first but ultimately made me a better programmer and leader. Additionally, I was responsible for ensuring that the design team's ideas were implemented as they wanted, the sound team's music and sfx played at correct times, and the art team's artwork and animations looked correctly. This required me to constantly communicate with my fellow officers, and then delegate tasks and deadlines to the programmers accordingly (and often stepping in to program features myself).