Leadership & Collaboration

Leadership Skills

Participate in courses and workshops to build your leadership skills

The LeaderShape Institute

The LeaderShape Institute is a FREE four-day experience that offers you a unique opportunity to develop a healthy disregard for the impossible. We are talking about getting out of your comfort zone and becoming the tipping point that changes everything. It can help you shape the way you look at the world and the way you influence positive change in it. The LeaderShape Institute is about building leaders interested in creating a just, caring and thriving world.

LeaderShape Resources

Leadership in Action Graduate Certificate

The Leadership in Action graduate certificate program offers a 15-credit immersive and rigorous experience for current and future leaders who are committed to driving meaningful change within themselves, their teams, and their broader environment. The curriculum is focused on developing both the strategic and relational skills needed to lead in a public, private, or non-profit environment.

Leadership in Action Graduate Certificate

Organize Departmental Seminars

Find ways to contribute as a leader within your department or discipline. Most departments and research centers on campus offer seminar series on a semesterly basis, and they are often partially student-run. You may propose a seminar speaker, invite them and host them while they visit campus for a few days. Through this process you will learn valuable leadership skills including networking, communicating, and creating and executing a work plan.

Organize a Session at a Conference

Organizing a session at a conference will help you network within your discipline, coordinate and execute a plan, and collaborate. It’s an excellent way to develop your leadership skills while showing your aptitude to advance your discipline.

Participate in or Organize Outreach Activities

Explore Community Engagement Opportunities

An important part of the Boise State mission is involvement with the community, and different colleges around the university have strong ties to the community through events, activities and internships. As a graduate student, participating in these opportunities will allow you to serve your community with the skills you’ve acquired during your graduate program and it will allow you to make important connections, and further develop your leadership and other professional skills.

Join a student club or organization

There are over 200 student clubs and organizations at Boise State University, which you can join to pursue work complementary to and beyond your disciplinary work.

Student Clubs/Organizations Resources

Networking

Schedule Informational Interviews

An informational interview is a meeting to learn about the experiences of someone working in a field or company that interests you. These interviews offer a great opportunity to help you explore the type of career path, industry, role, or company you might be interested in.  Your questions drive the interview and should be treated as a business meeting. You may set up these meetings by contacting someone you -or someone in your network- already knows or by sending out a cold outreach email by contacting connections via LinkedIn, for example. It is an underutilized strategy that is a highly effective networking tool.

Informational Interviewing

Network at a Conference

Conferences provide great opportunities for networking, although making connections might seem daunting. Talk to your advisor to get started, and tap into their network to make your first connections. You may contact someone you’d like to meet prior to the conference to set up a brief meeting during the conference. These types of meetings often lead to additional meetings with others in your discipline and serve as a great springboard to get started at networking within your discipline.