UC Bearcat - Weijie Li

Although the 2020 summer is affected by the pandemic, we are trapped at home and cannot travel as we did in previous summer vacations, but COVID-19 still cannot stop our determination to make friends. Just like when I became an honor retreat leader during the summer, I successfully became good friends with many other honor students and helped many students who are about to enter the university to establish a connection with the campus in advance. Although in this process, as a leader, I need to take on many responsibilities and continuously output my energy, this is also a process of harvest. And my three most important gains are friendship, an opportunity to review my past experiences, and this experience has helped me improve my leadership and teamwork skills. Reaping friendship is a gratifying thing, especially to be friends with some young people who have similar dreams with me because this is also an opportunity for us to communicate with each other and enhance our vision together. Because this year's retreat is held virtually, there are relatively fewer fun interactive activities. More are people sharing personal growth experiences, future dreams, and expressing their unique views on social issues. But this is also the opportunity for these communications to enable everyone to deeply understand each other, learn from each other from everyone's different experiences, perspectives, and grow together. Secondly, this is also an opportunity for me to review meaningful personal past experiences. Because in every meeting with students, as a retreat leader, I need to summarize and share some of my experiences to let them know about the rich campus activities and opportunities in advance. For example, as the research panel leader, I need to clearly tell everyone about my academic research experience, from how I found the opportunity, how to apply, how to pass the interview and the process of doing research. Therefore, I also need to prepare for sharing that experience by reviewing my own research experience. At the same time, the review process allowed me to review the research experience and reflect on my gains, deficiencies, and challenges encountered. It helped me consolidate the growth I gained in that experience, correct my shortcomings, and strengthen my self-confidence by reviewing how I broke through the challenges I encountered. Summarizing and reflecting on past experiences is very important because I believe that only experiencing something is not enough for personal growth. It is necessary to add summaries and reflections after experiencing it. Only in this way can I truly count as personal growth. Finally, this experience is an excellent opportunity to develop my leadership, teamwork, and communication skills. As the leader of a panel, I need to arrange the plan and discussion topics of each meeting reasonably and ensure that my sharing can truly help everyone succeed in academic research because my understanding of leadership is to help others succeed in their field. Also, I am one of the retreat leaders of the leaders' group. Therefore, I also need to coordinate the tasks released to me by my supervisor and cooperate with other Panel leaders to plan meeting topics and organize activities for a win-win situation. At the same time, I need to do a good job of communicating with your panel team members. For example, in the first virtual meeting, because everyone did not know each other, how to improve the relaxed atmosphere of the meeting was a significant communication challenge. Later, by creating a research panel group chat and designing an ice-breaking game at the beginning of each meeting, I quickly made the meeting atmosphere cheerful. Although during the whole retreat process, I encountered some challenges. In the end, I smoothly solve each challenge by adjusting my mindset and come up with creative methods. This experience helped me grow a lot while helping me get out of my comfort zone.