Giving tours to prospective students wouldn't be a leadership role, but being in charge of others who give the tours could be. If you want to call something leadership, be sure you are can give a description of the way in which you led others. Merely being voted into office often doesn't qualify.
While volunteering as a tutor is admirable and demonstrates many positive qualities, I do not see tutoring in and of itself as being an example of leadership. At the collegiate level, being a leader most often involves organizing a team of your peers to accomplish a mutual goal.
For the purposes of medical school application, leadership usually means you have taken a substantial oversight/management role in an organization. If you have to question whether or not you are in an oversight/management role then you are almost certainly not in an oversight/management role.
Oops, my bad. I guess it must depend on the school. Georgetown's md website classifies tutoring under leadership; my undergrad's med school info session also has that classification.
Thank you so much, this helps a lot. What about being a mentor to freshman college students? I am really lacking leadership and trying to find activities that I would enjoy, but I feel like a lot of them are just non-clinical volunteering instead of leadership haha. But the peer mentor thing is with my honors college at school, and we can mentor groups of freshman as they adjust to college. There is also a mental health ambassador position I recently got where I will help with outreach events with my school and possibly come up with new ideas for these, but again, I feel like this is just non-clinical volunteering. Thank you so much for responding though, your feedback has been very insightful!
A lot of the big organizations usually have leadership positions that are pretty easy to get once you have volunteered with them for a few months. Off the top of my head, the Red Cross has plenty, like vaccination ambassadors, where you oversee the vaccine drives. I'm not an AO but the mental health ambassador position definitely sounds like leadership to me.
Mentoring is another form of teaching. If you manage/train/take responsibility for the efforts of other mentors, that would be a form of leadership.
so just to clarify even the mental health ambassador is just volunteering? within that position I have the opportunity to come up with ideas for outreach events or possibly leading specific outreach events, so I would hope that that might qualify in the sense that I can use my position to, say, lead a particular event for mental health and student athletes, things like that. so essentially the position might not be leadership by itself but the things I can do within the position, like planning my own outreach event, might show initiative? I know the student ambassador is for sure just volunteering because I'm just doing tours, but I was hoping I can use the mental health ambassador for a form of leadership. again, thank you so much for your input!
If you come up with a new initiative and direct other students to implement the plan (for outreach, fundraising, or whatever), that would be leadership, whether it comes with an impressive title or not.
Not for med school application purposes. See comments in post #4 above.
