KC Royals Charities Scholarship Essay

In high school, I have been placed in many places with the opportunity for grand leadership. I am in 20/20 Leadership, National Honor Society President, student council representative, and varsity volleyball team captain, and I work at Rally House to soon become a team lead. There have been many opportunities given to me where I have had to express and undergo the pressure of being a leader. For example, I have been working at my job (Rally House) since about June of 2024, and in late October or early November of 2024, the managers I had been working with quit, which meant that new leadership was coming. When these new managers and leaders were placed in my workplace, they knew nothing. They were super confused and trying to learn certain basics while trying to exert dominance over their new workers, train themselves, and hire more workers.
The managers soon realized that they were not making any progress trying to do everything themselves, so they had to lean on certain workers, but not all the workers were trying to help them or even willing to help them progress. They then saw that they could lean on me. I knew what it felt like to be a new person and not know anything, and people look and treat you like an outsider. I gave them my number email, and I made myself completely available for them to get to know the workplace they were just put in and figure out how everything flowed. Any questions they had, any discrepancies they came across, any confusion they had with a rule, or even just wondering how to do something specific on the computer, they asked me. They would text me while out of work, at work, or even at school if they had a question they were going to ask. They scheduled me more hours and gave me more responsibilities because they saw my potential. If someone called in, they called me to come in, if they did not know what people were good at, they would ask me to help place them somewhere, if other associates needed help with something, they would recommend for them to ask me. So I went from being a regular sales associate to being one foot into being farther into being a team lead, and that came with more responsibility on top of my already busy schedule at school.
This responsibility that was placed on me taught me that forms of leadership can stem from many things and can come when you least expect it. Who knew all of my managers were going to quit and I was going to be the one that got leaned on? Who knew? I know I did not, but when the opportunity was given to me, I took it and ran with it as far as I could. This experience has been one of the biggest and most impactful to me because everyone (including myself) normally only speaks about the leadership that you come across while being in an actual school setting, but what about the settings that people are indulged in besides just in a school setting? This experience has made me realize that I have many great qualities of leadership, and the biggest one that is needed in the world is adaptability. I come from a small enough city and a super small high school, and I was always super scared to go to a large school, but after this experience and many others, I realized that I have to share my talents and ways of leadership with everyone with all fears aside. In my community, a need that is very important and a need that is destined to get attention is people wanting to better themselves and their education. A significant amount of students and peers around me, rather than in my school community, home community, or work community, lack that drive to want to go into the world and explore more of what’s out there. The first step to bettering this misconstrued idealism or even trying to make small differences in this community is to step out and be one, if not of many young adults, to show them differently. Success, happiness, and even wealth can all be achieved and attained, but not if you’re not willing to give any effort, so I plan to show people in my community how one action plan or way of attaining those goals can be reached. With that realization, I want to attend the University of Missouri-Columbia and major in physical therapy with a minor in social psychology. I want to use my adaptability skills to help athletes in pain while also pursuing my hopes of one day owning my practice and exerting leadership on the peers I work with as well as my employees.