Incoming students join Leadership Institute families

Mariel Luecke’s first day at Central Michigan University in 2021 was all strangers in masks. As a high school senior, she knew the faces behind the masks, she said. She knew their names.

At her first day of Leadership Safari, the Sarah R. Opperman Leadership Institute’s welcoming event, the only person she knew was Kaitlyn Mack. She met Mack during a gradual June reveal.

Mack and Luecke were paired through a Leadership Institute mentoring program for incoming students. Mack was also at Leadership Safari as one of the program’s mentor guides.

When Luecke got to her residence hall room that evening, she found a “Welcome Home” sign from Mack, Luecke said. Luecke said the sign and Mack’s mentorship over the subsequent months were key to her success at CMU.

“Without Leader Advancement Scholars, I don’t know how I’d be doing at Central,” she said. The relationship was made stronger by a bond of a common interest. Both came to CMU to pursue careers in education.

As an incoming freshman in the fall of 2020, Mack found CMU a very different place on her first day of Leadership Safari. It was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Leadership Safari is an immersive multi-day experience designed for lots of face-to-face contact.

Still, when Mack found her residence hall room, there was a “Welcome Home” sign on it. She met her mentor, Donna Diggs, who introduced her to her friends and showed her around campus.

The mentoring program that paired Luecke and Mack, and Mack and Diggs the year before, developed organically into family trees, said Dan Gaken, director of the Leadership Institute. Mentors offered more support to their mentees.

Throughout the school year, for instance, Mack and Diggs talked frequently. They had family dinners. They bonded and became close friends, especially over their shared religious beliefs.

Mack learned how to mentor other students. It started with putting them first, she said.

“It’s about ‘What she needs as a mentee,’” she said.

The mentoring journey for Diggs began when she met her mentor, Shelby Trevino, during a campus visit. Diggs had come to Mount Pleasant from Iowa with her father, an alumnus, she said. A winter storm was approaching, so they got a private tour. Trevino was their tour guide.

The two hit it off.

“It really sealed the deal,” Diggs said about the experience. She moved from Iowa to Michigan as her family relocated to New York State.

Mentors choose mentees based on a form that provides a biographical sketch of the incoming student. It helps improve the odds that a match will succeed. Trevino picked Diggs.

During their time together, both were involved in sororities. It gave them something to develop a stronger bond over.

Diggs also learned that the Leader Advancement Scholars family she joined was program royalty of sorts, tracing its lineage up to Gaken, the program’s director. Early that year, they posed for pictures wearing Burger King crowns as a fun nod to their “leadership lineage.”

Now an alumnus herself, Diggs draws on her experiences with the program, which started with Leadership Safari, for her current job leading a team of seven people in New York, she said.

“Going through the Leadership Institute has made me more confident in that role,” she said.

Trevino is still on campus, studying to become a physician assistant. She grew up in Beal City, about six miles west of CMU’s main campus, the daughter of a CMU employee. She was nervous to move to campus.

Safari started to help her understand that it was an opportunity to reinvent herself, she said. She built friendships with people she met at Leadership Safari that deepened during her time with the Leadership Institute.