A Culmination of Everything You Ever Thought You Knew

As the sun rose on our final day in this community of leadership, we, the students of the Duke TIP Leadership Institute were ready to present the product of all our sweat and toils these past two weeks - their Community Leadership Project. Each of us came to Duke TIP with an imagined dream for our project, and with the help of the counselors here we have been able to perfect that dream into a realistic reality that we will be able to bring home and implement in our community. From day one, the we worked one on one with assigned counselors to iron out all the kinks in our projects from fund-raising ideas to how to recruit volunteers and resources. Today we presented our Community Leadership Project in the form of a Powerpoint presentation to two counselors and a room of our peers. This presentation was the culmination of all that we have learned here in this program. We worked to clearly and concisely explain where our project is going and the steps it will take to bring it there - all within a ten minute time frame. The presentations went off without a hitch, and we were all pretty proud of all that we had accomplished.
With that under our belt, we bussed to West campus to fill up our stomachs. We headed back to the class room after lunch for our final discussion. We divided up into groups and created human statues and mimed to express how we felt we had grown as a group along with our most memorable experiences. The statues included motorcycles, chapels, trees, and pyramids - all various metaphors to our group growth here at TIP. After this brief activity, our groups circled up for one last group activity. Elaine would start off a sentence and we would each go around the circle and finish it. "The first thing I thought when I walked into this group was..." "One thing I did here at Duke TIP that I've never done before is..." As we each went around the circle, it was great to see how much we've grown, not only as leaders, but as a whole group. The past two weeks here at Duke TIP Leadership Institute have been a wonderful experience that has impacted every one of us here in ways that have helped us gain more self-awareness of our own leadership potential.
Good luck.