Essay Sample on Becoming a Registered Pediatric Trauma Nurse

In my professional and personal life I have been granted a plethora of opportunities to work in and lead teams. This ranges from leading a group project in school to being a Shift Lead at my part time job. These opportunities I speak of did not come easily, I fought tooth and nail to have them, but I would not have had it any other way. I am now projected to be a freshman in university and all of these events I will be speaking about are in my past, but now I plan to become an even greater leader. I plan to become a Registered Pediatric Trauma Nurse and in addition to that I am bilingual and a minority. 

As an insight on myself, I have three younger brothers; so as anyone can imagine I was born to wear the shoes of a leader…a role model. I grew up making sure my brothers knew right from wrong and I taught them how to do basic things, take math as an example. I would say that my first leadership experience outside of my family was in the eighth grade when I won a competition that many of my peers had also entered for a website I created based on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. This website took months to create and make as close to perfect as I could and many students from different schools entered the competition known as “National History Day” with their very own form of media, but I placed second out of all of them. It wasn’t this win that gave me leadership experience, but rather the aftermath of it. After my placement in the competition had settled, my social studies teacher at the time still made us work on these projects to create the best final result we could. I did not understand why she continued to have all of us work on the project, but I can say that I received an influx of questions from my classmates because they needed to be guided in the right direction. These students chose to ask me, someone on the same level as them, rather than their teacher, someone with a college degree. That is one of my most memorable and empowering moments of leadership. 

Additionally, outside of my education and family, I worked at Tropical Smoothie Cafe for a year and some change and eventually I was promoted to be a Shift Lead. Before I was promoted, I did almost everything a Shift Lead would do, if not more, yet I was constantly overlooked by my manager. I would come in on my off days, stay later, come in earlier, and everything in between. At one point he would ask Shift Leads who he should promote and they would all say my name. It wasn’t until I was about to quit that he gave me a Shift Lead position. The only difference between me being a crew member and Shift Lead is that as a Shift Lead I had a key to the store and I got to count the money. My time as a Shift Leader was fun, I made sure my team members had a good shift, I handled any problems, I counted drawers, and I locked up the store at the end of the night and I opened it early in the mornings. It was a little hard some days because as someone in a position of power, everyone looks to the person in charge for help when something goes wrong. For example, one night as I was closing, I had a team member yell “the sink is flooding the store”. I had to think quickly and without the help of my manager so I shut off the water source and we opened the back door, grabbed brooms, and started shoving the water out the door. I believe that the time I spent being a shift leader changed my perspective on people that have to run a business and for that I am grateful. 

Consequently, with leadership comes hardships. In reference to my position as a Shift Lead, as I mentioned it took over a year for me to be promoted; one day we had a new team member and she had been working there for three months, she had became best friends with our new manager and he had already made a plan to give her a position as assistant manager. It at the very least infuriated me, I dedicated so much of my time and patience to this specific job and it took me an entire year to even be considered for a promotion. A white girl works there for three months and has already earned a position higher than me and with significantly less experience. Shortly after this passed over, I put in my two weeks resignation, but it was not solely based on her being promoted to an assistant manager, but rather me being overlooked at a job that I would have done the most for, but would not get the same in return. 

At Virginia Commonwealth University, in my first class assigned group project, I plan to encourage everyone to use their voice and share their ideas. I am not one to get in a group and bark orders at people, I like to make sure everyone is comfortable because I would want the same generosity shown to me. The common thought in a group is that we just have one leader, but in reality we can all be leaders. We live in a world where most of us were born to lead, whether that be a group project, a movie, or a shift at a cafe. We all have it in us. 

In conclusion, the stories I have spoken about do not even begin to explain how I have impacted the lives of those around me nor how I will continue to do so. I have many stories I would love to share, but I would be well above my word count. As an African American young woman, nothing has ever been handed to me or anyone else that shares the same skin as me. It is not okay that we have adapted to having to work ten times harder than a white person and I feel that this needs to change, but it starts with us becoming the leaders. While we fight from the inside for our change, I know that all the work that African Americans have achieved as role models for our younger generations is notably honorable and we, as the future, should continue that legacy.