Continuing on from our previous Student Endowment Fund highlight, we will continue to highlight words of wisdom from some of the ITE student chapter past-presidents and what they learned from their time with ITE.

1. Please list your top 2 lessons learnt through your time with ITE

“Top two lessons learned: time management and delegation. While being President of Cal Poly SLO’s ITE chapter, I’ve learned to be mindful of my other responsibilities and extracurricular activities, which has pushed me to balance my time and always keep track of everything happening in my life, so that I don’t get overwhelmed with too many things happening at once. I’ve also learned to be more open and delegate tasks to my officer board, instead of trying to do everything by myself in the way that I think is perfect.”

– Jacob Hamada, Cal Poly SLO

“As a leader, a great lesson that I learned is to communicate your expectations. Everyone has an idea of how they would like an event to turn out and letting fellow officers know, whether it’s an expectation to attend or help out, having that conversation is key in planning.

Another lesson I learned is to meet as many people as possible and remember their names. The transportation industry is a big but small world – you’ll never know who you’ll get to run into again.“

– Sophia Tan, UCLA

2. What is one of your favorite ITE memories?

“My favorite memory from ITE was the in-person office visits! I don’t speak of a particular office but being able to see and talk to professionals in their workplaces was a great experience. Each had a slightly different office culture, transportation focus, and work style. Learning about the day-to-day work of a transportation engineer at each office made me think about what kind of work environment I want to surround myself with.”

– Garett James, UC Berkeley

“My favorite memory was during the last workshop of our STEM Outreach initiative, in which local high school students came to our college campus to participate in an interactive transportation planning workshop. Each of our USC ITE student leaders acted as a different stakeholder in our fictional city–including a parent, a business owner, and an avid cyclist. It was so fun to try and convince our high school student teams that they should consider our transportation needs over the other stakeholders’ needs. We also ordered way too much pizza for lunch, and so we got to eat as much as we wanted!”

– Arlo Fischer, USC

3. Do you have any advice for Future Leadership?

“My advice for future leadership is that you don’t have to know everything all at once! You’ll learn and grow throughout the year and you’ll figure it out – don’t stress too much about it.”

– Sophia Tan, UCLA

“My advice for future leadership is to consistently ask for feedback from your fellow student leaders, mentors, and student chapter members about what can be improved about your student chapter. Each time another voice is heard, the group grows even stronger, and you never know what great ideas people have until you ask them.”

– Arlo Fischer, USC

Thank you for joining us on this series~