Rockefeller Leadership Fellow: Kevin Donahoe ’17

This series introduces the 2016-2017 Rockefeller Leadership Fellows. Each fellow reflects on why he or she wanted to be a part of the program and what aspects of leadership most interests them.

RLF comes highly recommended as a program with a phenomenal representation of the diverse student body that exists at Dartmouth. The ability to collaborate with people from different backgrounds is a crucial element of great leadership, and RLF allows me to take advantage of Dartmouth’s unique student body. 

One aspect of leadership that significantly interests me is listening. In my view, the best leaders are not necessarily the best speakers or the people with the most innovative ideas, but they are the greatest listeners. Additionally, I also strongly believe in encouragement as being essential for leadership. In my experience, a team performs better when the leader emphasizes the positives rather than the negatives.

Big Green Apps is a group that I co-founded my sophomore fall with the dual objectives of connecting current undergraduate computer science majors with alumni working for technology companies in Silicon Valley as well as to enable the undergraduates to gain concrete mobile development skills. One primary challenge that I have faced as a leader of this group was maintaining strong communication and transparency among all team members given that the alumni were across the country and many students were studying abroad at various times. From this experience, I became aware of how crucial it is to keep a solid and consistent level of communication among team members.

Kevin Donahoe '17 was born and raised in the Palo Alto, California and graduated from Sacred Heart Prep. Kevin was the president of his class during his Junior and Senior years, as well as the captain of the Varsity Football and Varsity Basketball teams. He earned several awards in football, including National Football Association Scholar Athlete Award, Senior Player of the Year of the Division, and MVP of his team. At Dartmouth, Kevin is a Computer Science major. Outside of class, he has been a member of Student Assembly, the DALI Lab, and is the captain of the Club Basketball team. Additionally, Kevin studied abroad twice: in Fez, Morocco and in Budapest, Hungary. After graduation, Kevin plans to pursue a career in the tech world, hoping use technology to solve some of the world’s hardest problems.

Edited by Rachel Favors '18, Rockefeller Center Student Program Assistant for Communications