What I Learned From my Time as NHS President

It is hard to believe it has been an entire year since I was elected NHS chapter president. I have learned so much throughout the experience. These are my reflections on what we accomplished, how I grew as a person, and what it meant to serve in this role.

I will never forget our first meeting of the year back in fall of 2024. I am not quite sure what I was expecting going in to it; probably something fast-paced with lots of steps forward. But we spent almost 30 minutes (which was two thirds of our meeting time) discussing the most effective and practical way to deliver invitations to eligible associates. Coordinating distribution--even at a small scale such as ours--is surprisingly difficult. It takes an incredible amount of forethought, planning, and communication to ensure it happens efficiently and with little error. The excerpt makes me think about just how complex and chaotic global supply chains are. My experience has made me even more impressed with just how good society is at building these networks. I can order just about anything as random, niche, or specific as I can think of, and it will be sitting on my doorstep in generally no more than a week, but often no more than 48 hours. And the same is simultaneously true for billions of people around the globe, with the acquisition of components for whatever we ordered being equally if not much more complex. The fact that global commerce can be carried out so efficiently and with so little error is a testament to human ingenuity.

Later, I had the opportunity to present about the upcoming session of the Student Success tutoring program I spearheaded the establishment of to faculty and administrators. Never underestimate the power of good humor in a presentation. The whole room laughed when I talked about the "whopping 11 students" the previous session had worked with and at the same time a giant "11 students" appeared on screen. With a now captive audience, I detailed our plans for growth in the next session, and we have since far exceeded those goals. 11 students and no more than 11 mentor sessions rose to 41 students and 195 mentor sessions. Well-timed humor in a presentation keeps the audiences attention, and it breaks down communicative barriers between them and you. It is a trick I later employed in my senior capstone presentation.

I quickly got into the habit of releasing the agenda for upcoming meetings the week prior, and there was a form any member could fill out to add an item to the next meeting's agenda. That way, people could come in prepared, streamlining our meetings. Additionally, it provided a convenient means for welcomed community feedback. As the person in charge of something, you may not always be the one on the front lines. How could you possibly expect to be an effective leader and manager without the insights of those who are? It has been said by many great leaders, but to be a good leader, one should spend more time listening than speaking.

That rule is not just limited to members of the organization. It also includes the public. Thanks to teacher feedback, Student Success introduced high school workshops this year, which helped propel our performance numbers higher than ever before. Program visibility is also essential. One can not 'spread the word' enough. Student Success is pretty well known around campus now, but in the early days, students would come up to me all the time and ask: "what does the NHS actually do?" To which I would respond: "we run the Student Success program," which was inevitably followed up by: "what's the Student Success program?" Marketing has never been my strength, so I created the marketing subcommittee to look into how we could increase program visibility. I am grateful we have so many DECA members in NHS now thanks to the work done by my NHS chapter vice president and CBA's DECA chapter founder and president Sydney Correa. These students will be a tremendous asset to the NHS moving forward. But here's another lesson: take on tasks you can related to your strengths, but allow others to handle tasks related to their strengths. To say so is perhaps a bit cliché, but it couldn't be more true. Learn what each person brings to the table in order to effectively manage human capital.

And, eventually, there comes the time to step down and pass on the responsibilities of your office to new leadership with fresh eyes. In the early days of Student Success, having one clear point person taking on most of the responsibility helped the program get off the ground faster and smoother. As time went on and the organization became more established, however, its responsibilities grew far beyond what one person could realistically hope to manage alone. Delegation became key, and the contributions of each member made an impact on the organization's success. With growing enthusiasm from the members resulting from new, incoming energy and the program's success, the handoff was straightforward. I am proud to have played the role I played in building the Student Success program, but now, I have made my contributions. It is time for someone else to take a look at things from a new perspective and expand the program to new horizons.

There are still so many goals I had for my time as president that I never achieved. One that comes to mind was the implementation of the Student Success Phase II plan, which I wrote while I was still serving as the unofficial chairperson of Student Success, months before I became NHS chapter president and nearly a year before we made the Student Success chairperson an official position held by the president. The plan outlined a pathway to expansion of the program's online resources, particularly in developing student-made instructional videos on standards from each of the classes in our catalog. The original timeline targeted its completion before fall break during the 2024-2025 schoolyear. With all of the other work needed to upgrade the website and expand to workshops and the lower school, however, shifted priorities meant Phase II was never implemented. I still think student-made instructional videos are a great idea, and it's an idea I hope the incoming administration will look into. But that is not the take-away from this story. The take-away is that there will always be another goal, another great idea, and we just have to work hard during the time we have to make as many of them realities as possible. We can not linger in office hoping to make every single good idea a reality because that would take forever, and at some point, the quality of execution would fail to live up to its initial benchmark. In business and in life, few things are ever actually finished. It's not a negative reflection on the job one has done, but rather a testament to one's success; whatever one was a part of continues to grow, to change, to make an impact.

But let's pivot back to that essential question students used to ask me in passing: what does the NHS actually do? For plenty of chapters, it's just a title. But that wasn't good enough for me. To quote the end of the final letter I sent to NHS members as president: when I took on the responsibility of NHS president, I did not want us to be like many of the chapters around the country for whom “NHS” is simply a title. I couldn’t be content with telling people I am an NHS member without having any kind of positive impact to show for it. I find that idea incredibly tacky. If one is going to hold a title that distinguishes them, there should be a reason for that distinguishment. And with that, I will leave you with a quote. “In every day, there are 1,440 minutes. That means we have 1,440 daily opportunities to make a positive impact.” -Les Brown