Omar Hamdy (ChemE 1T8) was part of ILead’s Summer Fellowship. He got involved with ILead last year when he interacted with the Club Leaders Roundtable to discuss the needs of a club he was working with. As that club disintegrated, he founded ChemE Car and continued his involvement with ILead through the Club Leaders Roundtable, The Game, and the Summer Fellowship.
Omar founded ChemE Car in hopes of engaging himself and other chemical engineering students with the practical side of engineering. “I wanted to develop a learning culture as opposed to a results driven culture where all the focus is on getting to the competition” says Omar. He was able to synthesize a vision for ChemE Car based on components of visions of the Summer Fellows’ clubs. Also, over the course of the summer he received a lot of mentorship from Mike Klassen (ILead, Assistant Director – Community of Practice Engineering Leadership) and Jordan Daniow (ILead, Leadership Education Specialist) who coached him in getting over hurdles like recruiting. “I would spend a lot of time on the club but I wouldn’t see any results. I then started looking at my values and who I am as a leader, and decided to adopt resilience as one of my main values. I realized that you can’t expect to meet everyone in one day and everything to work out.”
He organized his team structure over the summer and established a common goal with his team. Everyone on the team is expected to perform to the best of their abilities, and if they don’t, they realize that they are hurting the team and themselves. In ChemE Car everyone takes complete ownership of their project, and it’s not a thing they take lightly. They are rewarded for their effort by mutual effort being put in by the rest of the team. “We make sure to talk things out, acknowledge it, and review it. What do you need, what do you want, and how can we get there. It is much easier to modify a club’s environment to people’s needs instead of the other way around” says Omar.
To Omar leadership is extremely dynamic and ever-changing depending on the current needs of his club. “A leader is someone who gets work done, but another day it’s someone who motivates others to do better, and on another day it’s someone who can do both.” At the time of our meeting – “Today leadership to me is a set of skills that work together, that help you communicate your needs and the needs of the people around you.” He suspects this definition will change next week, but he knows that leadership is not about being authoritative or forcing people but rather collaboration and guiding that collaboration to work towards a specific goal.
-Namya Syal