Rockefeller Leadership Fellow: Sam Colello '18

This series introduces the 2017-2018 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.

Communication, compassion, and decision-making skills are three essential aspects of leadership. I believe that communication is the most important element of being a leader because it is the glue that brings everyone together. It ensures that all members of the group are on the same page and it facilitates the collaborative process of completing a task. I admire leaders who are great communicators because it makes the process of achieving a goal smooth and easy to follow. 

Compassion and decision-making go hand in hand in that they both relate to understanding other people. Leaders must be able to express empathy and understand others, while at the same time be able to make decisions that are best for the group as a whole. I believe that leaders must find a balance between respecting others’ opinions and sharing their own thoughts. The ability to say no is widely overlooked, and successful leaders are people who are not only agreeable, but are also able to use their authority to make group-wide decisions. 

On campus, I am the student director of America Reads.  This program sends work-study eligible Dartmouth students to four local elementary schools to tutor younger students. We focus primarily on reading comprehension, but also help students on whatever they are learning when we arrive at the schools. As student director, I am responsible for organizing tutors and shift times, organizing workshops, scheduling social events, scheduling tutor check-ins, monitoring the blitz account, and supervising tutor attendance. It requires a lot of diligence and careful planning to coordinate all of this information to forty tutors, and RLF will give me the tools I need to run this program successfully.

Through the Rockefeller Leadership Fellows, I want to share all that I have learned from my different positions on campus with fellow leaders at Dartmouth and I want to develop my ability express my opinion in a leadership context where I will be able to cooperate more effectively with others to come to an agreeable solution for everyone. 

Sam Colello '18 is from Sudbury, Massachusetts and graduated from Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in 2014. At Dartmouth, Sam is a Psychology and Hispanic Studies double major with a minor in Education. He is the student director of America Reads, a tutoring program for elementary school students, and a mentor for DREAM. He is also one of the captains of the Club Baseball team and loves to play IM sports. Additionally, Sam is one of the social chairs of his fraternity Alpha Chi Alpha. He is a DOC member and has helped out with the first-year trips program for multiple years. He has done research for multiple professors in the psychology department working in a face perception lab and as a research assistant exploring new forms of therapy via text messaging. After graduation, he eventually plans on going to graduate school for psychology to become a clinical psychologist.

Edited by Alexandrea Keith '20, Rockefeller Center Student Program Assistant for Communications