Rockefeller Leadership Fellow: Shivam Chadha '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.

Two experiences during my Junior year radically transformed my view of leadership, and are why I now think about adaptability as a key leadership skill needed for many different industries and situations.

The first experience was at the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial forum where a Tuck alumnus, founder of TripAdvisor and CarGurus Langley Steinert, spoke about the challenges of leading his own company. In his presentation, he relayed to us that both TripAdvisor and CarGurus were only months away from running out of money after their first few years of operation. In response, Mr. Steinert tore up his previous business models and started anew. Mr. Steinert showed the necessity of being adaptable in the face of adversity.

The second experience was in my leadership of the 2016 Fed Challenge team, which is a national competition where colleges present to Federal Reserve officials on how best to react to current US macroeconomic challenges. While preparing for the competition, I realized how much I had to adapt over the course of our sessions. In the earlier sessions, our senior members had to speak often to help our newer members. I had to guide our discussions to give a broad overview of the US economy. However, with each additional session, our newer members spoke more frequently as they felt more confident about their economic analysis. Now, I was able to lead our discussions to more complex economic analysis and a more detailed understanding of the US economy.

RLF will allow me to build on these lessons of adaptability, and the essential characteristic of humility required in order to practice this essential leadership skill.

Shivam Chadha '17 grew up in London, United Kingdom and graduated from St Paul's School. He is a double Economics and Math major at Dartmouth College. He is a member of Hill Winds society, a student-alumni group that represents Dartmouth in front of its alumni. He also leads the student-alumni mentorship program, Class2Class, which pairs 2017 Dartmouth undergraduates with 2007 Dartmouth graduates in 5 major US cities. Previously, Shivam was a member of the Dartmouth triathlon team in his freshman and sophomore year. In his junior fall, he was a presenter in the Dartmouth team for the 2015 Fed Challenge, a national economic competition. Shivam has worked in London for an asset management specialized in macro quantitative investing and a hedge fund focused on American oil markets. In his junior summer, he will be working in New York for Credit Suisse.

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