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
Meet Henry Xu (ECE 1T9) – ILead’s new Student Clubs Liaison! Henry is going into his second year of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and has participated in many initiatives and clubs on campus including Engineers Without Boarders (EWB), The Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE), The Hatchery, and many more. As the Student Clubs Liaison, Henry will be reaching out to student groups and organizations to spread the word about and promote ILead’s Club Leaders Roundtable.
Henry first got involved with ILead as a participant in Leadership Labs. He discovered the Leadership Labs when he was looking for ways to get involved in extra-curricular activities, heard about The Game by ILead, and then started to explore ILead’s co-curricular and curricular offerings. Henry really enjoyed the Public Speaking Leadership Lab because it was interactive, but did not feel that he could apply the content of the Team Conflict Leadership Lab because his own class teams were working well together. However, he did feel that the Leadership Labs would be really relevant to the Engineering Strategies and Practice (ESP) design courses to help improve the team experience.
He encourages all students to get involved in campus life outside of academics, and to develop themselves through extra-curriculars. He says it took effort for him to search out opportunities because there was not any information during Orientation Week so he had to go out looking on his own.
He believes that engineering is a special profession where engineers need to work in teams and leaders help teams stay on task to tackle problems. The more engineers that are leaders, the better for society because more projects and problems can be worked out.