SPELMAN PROGRAMMING TEAM LEAD: LEADERSHIP ROLE IN AN ACADEMIC ORGANIZATION (SILVER 5 POINTS) - CLASS OF 2028

 Leadership Role in an Academic Organization (Silver 5 Points)

In October 2025, I had never competed in a programming competition. Though I was an avid programmer and a tutor in the computer science tutoring lab, competitive coding was entirely new to me. One day, I received an email inviting me to compete in the CCSC Southeastern Regional Competition, only to discover that I was the sole student who had responded. With only one participant, Spelman risked not competing at all. I took initiative and began recruiting peers whom I knew were strong students, collaborative, and motivated. Within a week, I assembled a team of four Spelmanites, and my teammates unanimously selected me as team lead.

I organized practice, delegated preparation tasks, assigned problem-solving roles based on our strengths, and made sure to communicate so that each team member felt supported and prepared. On competition day, we entered the lab confident. We were the only all-women team, and the only all-Black team. Throughout the competition, I facilitated collaboration by rotating responsibilities, ensuring everyone contributed to algorithm design, coding, and debugging. Though we did not place, we spent hours post-competition reviewing our performance and identifying areas for improvement. Our main pitfall was that we did not submit any of our code. We assumed because our code did not pass any of the initial test cases that we weren’t supposed to submit, thinking it was pointless to submit faulty code. In the end, several other teams had submitted code that didn’t pass all test cases and still placed. Had we had the confidence to submit our code even if it wasn’t perfect, we would have placed too.

The next week, I led the team into the Advanced Coding Collective’s AUC-wide coding competition. During the competition, we navigated through problems much more seamlessly and were sure to submit any running code. We finished third in the advanced category and were the only underclassmen team to place. Since then, I have recruited and mentored new team members, expanding the team from four members to twelve. This experience taught me that effective leadership requires initiative, communication, and the ability to empower others. Even though competitive programming was new to me, the key to improvement was not natural talent, but a willingness to fail and learn from our mistakes. By learning alongside my team, I discovered how collective effort and purposeful leadership can achieve incredible results, and most importantly, improvement.

Eden Wilson