Oct. 2024 Department Debrief: Buckeye Leadership Fellows
October 21, 2024
Buckeye Leadership Fellows
To contact Buckeye Leadership Fellows: Email osublf@osu.edu, follow them on Instagram or visit their website.
Department Debrief is a monthly article from the Parent and Family Relations office dedicated to helping family members and supporters better understand the services, opportunities and support offered by particular offices for students.
This month, our team met with Buckeye Leadership Fellows, a program that partners with alumni and community leaders to provide undergraduate students with unique and transformative experiences to gain competitive advantages in their post-graduate pursuits while remaining connected to Ohio State.
1. If you were stuck in a corn maze and the only way to get out was to explain what Buckeye Leadership Fellows is, what would your 30-second elevator pitch be?
Buckeye Leadership Fellows (BLF) is a competitive program at Ohio State dedicated to providing undergraduate students with transformative experiences in partnership with alumni and community leaders, Mercedes Wallace, the director of BLF, said.
Built to give its students a competitive advantage in their post-graduate pursuits, BLF offers a variety of opportunities, including global experiences, leadership challenges, mentorship and more.
“[BLF does] leadership, personal and professional development for sophomores through senior year, so for two and a half years,” Wallace said.
A few of their programs are available for those outside of the program as well.
BLF’s “Time and Change” Podcast, although unavailable at the moment, is just one example.
“’Time and Change’ actually took a pause, but one of our students is working on bringing it back,” Wallace said. “It is a student-led podcast focused on changemakers on campus and different styles of leadership.”
Wallace said BLF works with students to reframe their thinking when it comes to success and leadership, and the podcast is an opportunity to focus on that from a student perspective.
Besides listening to a podcast, bibliophiles can see what staff and students recommend reading on their “BLF Reads” page.
Providing recommendations to the community, BFL hopes anyone can build and develop their leadership or simply add to their TBR list.
For Fellows, Wallace said “BLF Reads” is not a requirement, but it still offers them the opportunity to branch out and explore topics they wouldn’t necessarily have approached themselves.
BLF’s leadership challenges are just one example of the many opportunities the program offers students.
With three challenges throughout the program, students are assigned to a team and an organization, which provides students with a current problem they face. The fellows must then work together to exercise their leadership skill sets and create potential solutions for these organizations.
“One of [the organizations] is a nonprofit or small business, one is a government or policy entity and one is a corporation,” Wallace said. “For example, last semester our seniors worked with Boston Scientific, which is a Fortune 500 company.”
Such challenges allow fellows to experience hands-on learning, develop their teamwork skill sets, work with organizations related to their interests and build their resumes.
Beyond providing these opportunities, Wallace said BLF is completely donor funded, meaning they prioritize being access-driven and access-founded.
“We are the only interdisciplinary cohort program on this campus…all of the money that comes in from donors goes strictly back to how we can remove barriers to make students even more successful than they dreamed possible,” Wallace said. “Our entire ethos is how to reframe failure.”
2. Ohio State has many departments dedicated to student professional and leadership development. How is Buckeye Leadership Fellows different?
“It’s different because of the interdisciplinary piece of it,” Wallace said. “Buckeye Leadership Fellows is open to all majors [and] that is what makes it function the way it [does].”
Beyond its multi-major involvement, Wallace said BLF is unique because of its donor-funded status, making it a secular cohort with a competitive and selective application process.
“This year we had 240 applicants, [and] we only take 30 of them, so it is a tight application process,” Wallace said. “[Applicants] are very high achieving; I think the best of the best students.”
Wallace also said BLF is distinct in its efforts to truly challenge its students.
“I do believe if we are doing our job properly, the students are going to be mad at us sometimes because we are supposed to make them angry, we are supposed to push them out of their comfort zones,” Wallace said. “We push them to dismantle what failure looks like and go and dream bigger than what they thought possible.”
3. How can parents/families become involved with Buckeye Leadership Fellows?
“We are always looking for parents that are interested in mentoring students,” Wallace said. “Rather than us just pairing students with people, we get a database of people interested in mentoring, from our alumni to friends of BLF to board members, and then students get an opportunity to go through that database, look at the interests and background of the people and then pick themselves who they best mesh with.”
Wallace said BLF finds the best way mentoring works is if students pick their mentors themselves, so not to lose the serendipitous feeling of it all.
“I want to empower students to actually pick out their mentor, and I trust that they know how to do that,” Wallace said. “It’s just our job to provide resources, not to force them through the door.”
Another way to participate with BLF includes being a Buckeye Champion if their employer or organization wishes to be a challenge partner.
“We are always open to discuss how we can involve [parents and families] as a challenge partner,” Wallace said. “If you want to do a short pop-up challenge as a one day [event], we can do that, or if you want to do one of the three-month [challenges] and you work for a company that could benefit from it too.”
Wallace said parents and families looking to participate in the three-month challenges, however, should make sure their organization has a problem that needs fixed but might not necessarily be able to correct because of a lack of time or resources.
“We have 30 extra brilliant brains that will come up with five different solutions for you,” Wallace said.
Past organizations have included Kroger, Abercrombie and The Crew, Wallace said.
Lastly, Wallace said parents and family members can choose to be session leaders, where they have 90 minutes to talk about a particular topic with the students.
To participate in any of the above programs, Wallace said parents and families simply must reach out by email to BLF.
4. If you could offer one word of advice to parents, families and students, what would it be?
“Related to life, related to college and related to BLF broadly, the piece of advice that sticks out to me right now is that if it does not challenge you, it does not change you,” Wallace said.
Wallace said everyone is at their best when out of their comfort zones.
“Students leaving parents and coming to college can be really scary on both ends, but that is how families grow [and] how students grow,” Wallace said.
Wallace said BLF is just one way to challenge students to go outside of their comfort zones.
“In this program specifically, it is all going to feel uncomfortable sometimes,” Wallace said. “That is what [BLF] is designed to do, to push [students], but I think it spits out better leaders as a result of it. Students are kinder, more compassionate, more resilient and that is a direct correlation to the work [BLF does].”
Brooke Tacsar
Student Assistant
Parent and Family Relations