This article is part of a series on engineering leadership at U of T. Over the past couple months, the ILead team interviewed emerging leaders and students in formal leadership roles to get their insights into leadership and experiences with ILead. Check back throughout the summer for more student profiles. #UofTEngineeringLeadership
“Being a leader means you can inspire people to work hard. Every action you do is important because people look up to you” says Natalie Tleel (CHEM 1T9).
Natalie is an emerging leader in her second year of Chemical Engineering. “Since high school I have always chosen to take charge. I am not afraid to take risks” says Natalie. She was a team leader for her design project team in APS111 and APS112, class representative for U of T’s chapter of the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering, attended Leadership Labs, and was a participant in ILead’s year-long program The Game.
Natalie joined The Game with her sister with the hopes of addressing global warming. “We wanted to make students more aware of how their actions [littering, producing waste, not recycling] were contributing to global warming. We had a small idea in mind and wanted to develop it more. I wanted to work on a real life problem and discover results not discovered yet” says Natalie. Some of her most power learnings in The Game occurred when she interacted with external facilitators from Engineers Without Borders who helped her team narrow the scope of their project by identifying stakeholders.
Through her leadership journey Natalie has learned that “nothing is impossible as long as you know how to think about it”. According to Natalie you need four key ingredients to make the impossible possible: positive attitude, organization, detailed explanations, and communication skills.