The Global and Community Leadership Honors Program

-Caperton Gillett

UAB Honors Academy, Fall 2008 (pdf)

 

“Global”? Doesn’t that sound a bit ambitious?

Robert Corley, Ph.D., doesn’t think so. As director of the Global and Community Leadership Honors Program, he is charged with the task of taking motivated, passionate students and turning them into the leaders that will shape policy not only at home but also, he hopes, literally across the world.

“There are several things that I think really lend themselves to this notion of the ‘global’ part of our name,” Corley says. “One is that UAB has always had this global outreach from its beginning, and it’s only grown over the last 25 or 30 years. The other thing is that the world has changed—distance doesn’t matter anymore.”

 

STEPPING OUT

Corley says he has been surprised by the number of current and prospective students who have already spent time abroad, many on mission trips with their churches. “These are young people who are already rather worldly,” he says. “They’ve already seen other parts of the world.”

The goal of the program, he says, is to expand on their experience by giving a different perspective than that found on the standard mission trip or study abroad. The program encourages students to take ownership of certain issues that affect them in both a local and a global sense and explore the impact of that issue at home and around the world.

The Global and Community Leadership Honors Program starts students off in their freshman year with self-examination and study, exploring their own talents and interests and finding an issue in which they hope to take leadership. “That’s what everyone has to do, ultimately, if they’re going to lead in a particular area,” Corley says. “First of all, you have to know what it is. That means you have to know yourself.

The first course in the program is called “Exploring Birmingham” and takes students around the city and surrounding areas, seeing problems that challenge the city and that can be universalized to urban communities everywhere. They move through their core curriculum with the dual goals of satisfying requirements and examining their own interests. Before their third year, they adopt an issue of interest for future study and, ultimately, complete an honors thesis.

 

SPEAKING UP

Corley says that a key aspect of leadership, and thus of the program, is educating others about the issue at hand. “One of the things a leader does is communicate to others what he or she knows,” he says, “to put out a vision of what you know and share it with other people to motivate them to see the world in the same way you do. That communication skill is something that needs to be honed” through thesis writing and formal presentation.

Sophomore Brittney Jones found challenge and inspiration in that goal. A self-described shy girl—“a person who would never say much,” she says—Jones found opportunities to find her voice and learned a new style of leadership. “It helped me to know that leadership isn’t being the loud one or the one who’s always speaking, but it comes in different shapes and forms,” she says. Through the program, she participated in the Leading Edge Institute, a leadership program for women in Alabama and an opportunity that she never would have had without the Global and Community Leadership Honors Program, she says.

“We also started thinking how beneficial it would be if they had some experience with this issue out in the world,” Corley says. That experience comes through service learning under experts working on the student’s own issue of choice, getting hands-on experience to understand the immediate impact of that issue on the community.

“That’s how we’re looking at this,” Corley says. “There’s this practical aspect, not just theoretical, in which we ask students to really go in depth.” Ideally, he says, the practical aspect would also include intensive study while immersed in another culture. “There are certain ways we might approach a particular problem in the United States,” he says. “How might someone approach it in a developing country, for example? Or in a country that’s an emerging democracy? There’s a lot to be learned, I think, about leadership on these kinds of issues, looking at how leaders are handling those issues elsewhere under different kinds of circumstances.”

 

LOOKING INWARD

The Global and Community Leadership Honors Program is, he says, “a program that permits highly motivated students to find what really turns them on, what they’re passionate about, what they deeply care about, and how they want to change the world. Then we provide them with the tools and experiences necessary to do that—the knowledge, the service learning, the experience in the world, to give them the insights and the ability to become that kind of transformative leader for the 21st century.”

With a mother from Hong Kong, a father from Vietnam, family in Australia, and a year spent as an exchange student in Germany, sophomore Bonnie-Kim Hang has plenty of global experience, but it’s the community aspect of the program that really attracted her. Hang hopes to become an optometrist and give back to her community. “I could name my personal physician and another physician who are really strong leaders in the community,” she says. “That, to me, was somebody I could look up to. If I could be a leader in my hometown later on and remember there are people that I can teach to fill in my shoes, I would love to do that.”

“Just looking at the name and hearing the description, you understand that this is primarily about making the world a better place and about helping people,” says sophomore Austin Luker. “Whatever you want, whatever your interests are, you can put those in the context of social responsibility, what you’re good at, and what you’re going to do to improve lives.”

 

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Facing the Issues

Students in the Global and Community Leadership Honors Program are encouraged to adopt issues that interest and motivate them and become experts on that subject.

• Bonnie-Kim Hang, methamphetamine use: “One of the biggest issues [in her hometown of Arab] is the use of meth. My parents own a convenience store in town, and you see people come in, you see the drastic changes over the years, and you know it’s from drugs. I want to know why meth is such a big problem in my small town. So I may pursue that.”

• Austin Luker, rural medicine: “I’ve been interested in medicine for a long time, and I’ve done shadowing and volunteering around my hometown, which is a rural area. I’ve noticed that there aren’t as many opportunities for people to seek free medical attention as there are in an urban area. And the options for these people are extremely limited; they’ll either choose not to seek medical care or they’ll go to the emergency room for minor illnesses, just because they can’t pay doctors’ fees.”

• Brittney Jones, education disparities: “Education is something that I always felt strongly about. Even through middle and high school I started noticing the disparities of education between the rich and poor, between races. How can these kids compete or achieve higher education if they’re not given the resources and tools? We always criticize these kids for dropping out of school or not passing the graduation exam, but we’re not giving them the tools to compete or to further their education.”