In my opinion, leadership is a process where an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal. It is a process of interactions and mutual influence between the leader and the followers. Leaders can emerge in a wide range of context, from smaller scales like leaders in school’s group assignments, people who run organizations, to larger scales like leaders who promote social changes for a better world. The “common goal” is also not necessarily something very clear and specific, like “finish the task by next week with a high quality. It could be big and abstract, yet powerful, like “fight for a better tomorrow”.

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For me, I want to become an ethical, responsible and approachable leader who is able to lead a collaborative and efficient team in the future. I want my team members to become friends with each other and support each other, while sharing the same goals and working hard towards the goals. What’s more, since I am passionate in mathematics, and I will be going to graduate school in applied mathematics, I hope to further develop my leadership skills in this area and make contributions to the mathematical society one day. To achieve these goals, I will plan out my career and life developments every few years, and will identify the leadership skills that I need to improve for the time periods.

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In this PDP, I will summarize how my leadership skills improved in the past four years, during my undergraduate study in UIUC. In the end, I will also make a rough plan of how I will further develop my leadership skills in my future graduate study. As there are many uncertainties with regards to which school I will be attending and what opportunities it will offer, my future plan will not be very detailed for now. However, this rough plan will give me a general direction of development to go into and will remind me of my leadership goals along the way.

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I have identified my ten core values as: Accomplishment; Accountability; Activeness; Experience; Care; Charity; Happiness; Love; Humor; Freedom. My top three among them are: Freedom; Accomplishment; Love. These core values are important to me because they are part of who I am now, and will be what I want to achieve in the future. In the perspective of leadership development, because of “love”, I aim to be a leader who truly cares about his/her team and is willing to offer help whenever needed; because of “accomplishment”, I hope to encourage my team to take on challenges, conquer hardships and make achievements both on the individual level and the group level; because of “freedom”, I hope people who work with me can have enough autonomy, and I hope that the team I lead to form an open-minded and supportive atmosphere, where everyone can share their opinions freely.

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