Blog #1

Hello everyone! My name is Jackie Kitchen and I am a junior from Colorado Springs, CO.  I am a very outgoing person and love meeting new people. I am currently on the Ohio State University Women's Club Soccer Team, which I joined last winter. It has been great meeting new girls who try out each season and has enhanced my college experience tremendously. I am currently working towards a double major in Accounting and Finance at the Fisher College of Business, which I enjoy very much because I really like math and numbers. In the business world, you are surrounded by people and are expected to be able to work in teams to complete various tasks. For instance, auditors work in teams at the client site every single day to prepare and finalize the audit for the client. While thinking about scheduling classes, I felt that Team and Organizational Leadership would be a very interesting class and would be extremely beneficial to take while I am preparing for my future in the business world. Last summer, I interned at PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP), a Big 4 Public Accounting firm here in downtown Columbus.  I constantly worked with other interns to complete projects and tasks, which was an amazing experience. However, I believe I learned more from myself in summers past, where I worked at a 5 Star Resort in Colorado Springs, namely The Broadmoor. For 4 consecutive summers, I worked as a waitress at the outdoor pool serving poolside guests food and beverages of all sorts. The Broadmoor hires employees from around the world, so I was able to work with people from England, South Africa, Latvia, Hungary, and Jamaica. Since I returned to the pool each year, I was one of the more experienced servers and was fortunate enough to train many of these foreign servers, and many from the states as well. Not only did I learn a lot about the cultures of different people from all over the world, but I learned a lot about myself through leadership positions. I am quite an outgoing and energetic person, and realized that this made me approachable for those who were in need of help. I tried to set an example for those who I was training by working diligently but having a continuous smile while talking to coworkers and guests. After being approached for help many times, I began to realize that my coworkers would learn better when I coached them through a task, allowing them to go through the steps themselves rather than simply showing them what to do. This took a lot of patience to sit down to help them through each task, especially if the pool was busy, but I believe this patience and understanding helped them grasp each task more quickly. After my final summer at The Broadmoor in 2014, I learned that the key to leadership is being understanding, approachable, and hardworking because people look up to you and rely on you for their own success.