Reaching Out to Inspiring Women May Seem Daunting, But They Love It! So Do It!
My name is Jessica Zhang, and I was a 2017–2018 Miss CEO Ambassador. When I was selected last year around this time, I was so excited to join a group of amazing girls from across the country trying to pursue leadership in their families, schools, communities, and beyond by sharing their skills with others and starting initiative to benefit society.
In July, I attended the Miss CEO Summer Leadership Academy at Stanford University. From there, I knew that I had joined into the right organization because for the first time in my life, I was overwhelmed by the amount of kindness, friendship, and support that made me feel all giddy and happy inside every day after I left the program to go home. Nita delivered one of the most powerful speeches ever, rooted in her own experiences of studying in the male-dominated field of engineering and eventually hiring at some of the top Silicon Valley companies. I vividly remember Michaela ran around the engineering quad frantically trying to locate my lost iPhone that kept beeping from the wrong GPS location. Sarah coached me to deliver a persuasive elevator speech to get an internship, encouraging me to go for it and teaching me how to highlight my best qualities in under a minute. Maria left me with important advice at the graduation ceremony that changed my attitude on how I approached academic classes the following school year; she said that I have a powerful voice that should be heard more often, dispelling my worries that I might sound annoying if no one else in my class ever talks. I left more empowered than I had ever been, ready to take any challenge headon.
Attending SLA made the transition to being a Miss CEO Ambassador seamless, as I was equipped with a leadership toolkit already and provided with the most amazing mentor — shoutout to the Ambassador Director Sabina Chaudhuri! She organized monthly web conferences through Webex, and we even met for the first time in person this year when she was visiting Boston. Not only was she highly supportive of my leadership project, by always welcoming all calls, texts, and emails, she often inquired about my personal ambitions and eventual goals that would lead to my desired future of being a social entrepreneur. During my time as an ambassador, I learned to become a leader and advocate for myself in pursuit of these personal goals by setting concrete timelines and accessing help wherever I needed it.
When I first started brainstorming ideas for my leadership project, I came up with a lot of different and wild ideas. I imagined creating an app and organizing field trips to local businesses, but ultimately I felt that creating a speaker series of incredible women would impact the girls in my community the most. Female executives are greatly outnumbered by men in the current workforce. There are many ways to be a leader, and I wanted girls to know that being a CEO isn’t the only way. Anything from being a teacher to organizing sports events are ways for these girls to get involved with their community and make it more interesting to be a part of.
With my concrete idea in place, I set stepping stones and ladders spaced out across the school year to achieve goal. Some of the strengths I anticipated, such as easily accessible across time zones and geographical location came true, while I was surprised at my initial belief that the weakness of my project would be getting email responses from these female leaders. I did face challenges in recruiting members to show up and finding a room, time, and technological equipment to host the events, but I had overcome these obstacles by getting advice from Sabina. I increased the participation of members by planning meetings, writing emails, organizing events, and worked with my business club advisor to open up his classroom for these events. I ended up organizing a school field trip to the iRobot Headquarters, which was one of Further Steps goals, and it ended up being a blast!
One of my goals was to teach students how to reach out, talk to, and maintain relationships with mentors that can give them life advice and inspire them to pursue a managerial position in the future. It’s vital for girls to realize the importance and capabilities of having leaders in the workplace, so training them at a younger age will enable them to be confident in their skills.
The community will see a rise of females taking action, such as heading up charity events, clubs, sports, speeches, etc. and this diversity is crucial to promoting the next generation of females executives in the workplace.
My leadership project was focused on building a network of inspiring women who could give us advice and answer our questions through online interviews. In total, girls from my school were addressed by Nadya, a social activist, Carol Ng, a Bank Director, Addie Swartz, a CEO, and Rita Allen, a lawyer who owns her own law firm. By forming such a community of female leaders, these young women can be the best versions of themselves: confident, poised, optimistic, assertive, creative, kind, determined, and innovative. I followed up with these women by actually getting to meet them if they lived close to me.
