For me, the Virtual Leadership Camp (VLC) was an event where we were able to learn more about leadership, whether it was about the qualities of a leader or what type of leader you want to be. It was also a camp where you could express your actions when becoming a leader. This activity boosted my confidence and it definitely helped me to learn a lot about leadership and how to take care of things such as organizing games, taking care of a Kahoot! game for my group’s presentation, and solving problems that might arise.

I think that the VLC was a great activity that I personally enjoyed. This event taught me to be more organized and helped me to be more responsible when organizing the activities. I was picked as one of the student representatives and had to lead an activity at the end of the camp. Let me tell you, it was pretty stressful. At the same time, I had to work on the project of the presentation to PYP 3 & 4. So, this activity was a great learning experience for me because I got to see the type of leader I am and it boosted my confidence. Overall, this camp was pretty amazing.

There were many different activities that I enjoyed, but I personally preferred the keynote speakers. The first keynote speaker was our president and vice-president from OSIS (Sonya & Josephine). Surprisingly, I really enjoyed the keynote speakers. Usually I would get really bored with guest speakers, but this time it was different. I specifically chose the president and vice-president from OSIS just because I am thinking about running for president/vice-president for STUCO next school year. The information was really helpful and quite entertaining, not gonna lie. The second speaker – Margharet Brigita Wibisono – was very fun. I got to learn some skills when leading a team. I also got to know what leadership style I’d like to have when leading a group. I’ll tell you a little about that: I am very precise, clear, orderly, accurate, critical, and I am able to find logical reasoning and sequencing. I found this out by filling a table that has all the different characteristics and I had to rate them from 1 to 4 depending on how relatable it is. Then I sum up all the numbers and I figured my style by which style had the most numbers summed up. Honestly, this was pretty accurate. So the main reason why my favorite activities were the keynote speakers was because it really helped me with my leadership skills of how to be the president/vice-president in STUCO or even just leading a small group.

Considering that I was on the student representative team, it made things challenging, especially time-management. The student led activity session was on Wednesday and we had a meeting on Tuesday. During that meeting we faced a problem: the game could only reach up to 8 players and we had to have around 20 people in the game! That made it really stressful considering I also was in charge of a Kahoot! for my group presentation. How did I solve that, you ask? Well I used a bit of knowledge from the keynote speaker. I decided to organize a meeting on Tuesday night with my friends that were also working on the game and we figured out a whole new plan last minute. In the end, it was all worth it because I had fun and it was a success.

“Leadership starts by leading yourself.” That was our VLC quote and I think that it really is true. You can’t have leadership if you don’t start leading yourself because to have the want to lead something, you need to lead yourself to take the risk to lead others. Being a leader is not that easy and it takes a lot of courage. During this camp, I learned one big lesson: to trust myself and believe in myself that I can do it. And that’s what you need to do, too. I am reminding you that you DO have the ability to lead others. But that isn’t until you start leading yourself. That is what I want to share with you about leadership and I do hope that you enjoyed reading this.

Bianca Madeleine Dinoto – PYP 5