Rocky and Me: Deep Singh '17 Senior Reflection

In the Rocky & Me series, Seniors reflect on their experiences during their time at Dartmouth.

I first became involved at the Rockefeller Center my sophomore year, when an upperclassmen friend and mentor recommended that I apply to become facilitator for the Dartmouth Leadership Attitudes and Behaviors program, or better known as DLAB. As a facilitator for the program, I discovered that the conversations I was having with program participants were causing them to think more intentionally about their Dartmouth experiences. I saw how DLAB provided an organic and fitting space for students to learn about each other on a deeper level, and I wanted to be part of the program’s future development. As a result, I became a Student Program Assistant for DLAB during my junior and senior years. Under this position, I was able to grow both as a facilitator and as an organizer of events.

Looking to continue my own leadership development, I decided to apply to become a Rockefeller Leadership Fellows. RLF turned out to be the single most valuable program I have done at Dartmouth. The program has helped me develop skills such as how to effectively communicate, negotiate, and balance competing interests. It has helped me learn how to reflect intelligently, and it has provided me with an array of tools that I have applied to my other involvements on and off campus. There have specifically been four broad ideas from RLF that I have applied to diagnose and resolve group conflicts in my other commitments:

(1) The Leadership Compass Activity in Jay Davis’ session helped me understand how different leadership styles complement one another, and the difficulties that may arise between them. (2) The STAR/AR framework for feedback presented in Betsy Winslow’s session helped me learn to relay positive and constructive feedback in a specific and clear way. (3) The Ladder of Inference model presented in Sadhana Hall and Roshni Pinto Powell’s session helped me identify how different individuals may arrive at different conclusions when observing the same exact facts. (4) The Effort-Performance-Outcome framework in Alison Fragale’s session helped me evaluate how individuals become motivated to perform certain actions.

As a result of my experiences in DLAB and RLF, I have learned how to become an effective communicator and now have a set of tools that I can use to confidently participate in any group setting. More than anything, my involvement in the Rockefeller Center has inspired me to believe that leadership is a learned quality, and not something that you are just born with. As an introvert, that has been a particularly strong motivator for me to develop leadership skills that have pushed me out of my comfort zone. After graduation, I will be working in consulting and am excited to bring such skills to the many groups I will be working with. My involvement with the Rockefeller Center has given me the confidence to succeed in my future endeavors, and has encouraged me to think about taking on management roles in my future career.

Written by Deep Singh, Dartmouth Class of 2017, is graduating with a double major in Economics and Philosophy.