Director and assistant director of Bucks County Community College’s student engagement and leadership development, Chris Seifert and Naomi Thompson, held a conference to discuss the recently launched Centurion Leadership Program and explain its purpose to the students.

“In short, we seek to develop student’s leadership skills as well as help them know what their leadership skills are through a series of successions per semester”, said Thompson.

Having experience in leadership training for over three years before starting work at Bucks, Seifert first implemented the program in the previous spring semester to better educate the students on the depth of leadership’s concept.

Initially meant to undergo just the spring semester, its well-liked reception led to this school year being the program’s first official year of it being fully utilized.

For this, the two explained that the program consisted of introducing themed activities to participating students and having them try their own hands in those particular themes.

As Seifert elaborated, “One of the topics might be goal setting, and so we’ll ask them to actually set goals there in the room. We’ll do an activity, we discuss goals in small groups, and then we’ll discuss goals in full groups.”

After each activity, another achievement that both Seifert and Thompson want students to reach is for them to better process their own acts of leadership to strengthen their understanding of it.

The activities also help students learn what to do in a real-life setting, as it’s not only something engaging for the students to have fun with, but also practical exercise too.

Knowing full well that leadership is not smooth sailing, the directors come prepared to teach about the struggles of leadership, such as rising and occurring problems, and how to deal with them.

“Conflict management and conflict resolution was something we added last year because that is something everyone will need to learn”, said Seifert.

An example of the practical usage was directly reported to Seifert and Thompson when a couple of students discussed an experience they had within a leadership position, they had the opportunity to enact what they learned from the program’s activities.

“We had two students come to us and say we actually used what you taught us in the conflict management session to mitigate a conflict that they had in friendships with students”, described Thompson.

As it is essential to the core concept, both Seifert and Thompson also aim to ensure students possess the knowledge needed to lead individual kinds of people in individual ways.

“You are going to lead people who are not like you, who you wish they were”, said Seifert.

With an entire school year at Bucks for the leadership program to see through, one can only wonder what great things and great leaders can be born from it.