Exploring Leadership and Communication Skills at Krannert School of Management (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: When you look at leadership on the campus, I mean, I don't know how many there are, probably eight, nine hundred different organizations students could have the opportunity to join. Right within Krannert, I mean, there are some wonderful leadership opportunities. The Student Management Employer Forum, which puts on the job fairs every year. We have the Student Management Council, the Ambassadors, there's some great organizations just right here in Krannert that our students can get involved in to get some of that leadership experience. Not to mention many, many other organizations and clubs. So I think it's important for when a student gets here, and I usually tell them as a freshman, you're here in the first year, maybe even the first three semesters, you're really exploring, you're investigating. So it's your job to really look out there, find where your niche is. You know, it may be within Krannert, it could be outside of Krannert, and it really doesn't make any difference. I mean, but I think students need to understand that while academics are the priority to just basically do nothing but go to class and go home and study, and you can do extremely well, that's wonderful. But that's just a part of college life, and that's just a part of what potential employers are looking for. When it comes to those soft skills, they're looking for students to have some level of leadership experience. They want to see students who are able to speak well, who can write well. I know many cases students don't enjoy taking the composition classes at Purdue, the business English course, they don't particularly enjoy that. But those courses are very important, and they're important to their academics, their future academics here. One thing that I'll hear many times in discussions with faculty is, our students don't write well. So that's an area that I think all of our students, whether they're even domestic students, international students, they need to concentrate their efforts on their communication skills. And again, that's a major soft skill area that I think that employers are looking for. And they understand, too, that that's a big area of improvement that can be made by Krannert students.