Assessing Your Leadership Capacity (PSY2230, Stress, Resilience, and Behavioral Change)
This course examined how individuals respond to sustained stress and what separates resilience from mere endurance, covering both the psychological mechanisms involved and practical strategies for managing them over time. I have been running six organizations concurrently while finishing my degree full time for two years, and that means operating under continuous pressure, where recovery periods are rare and the workload doesn’t change, regardless of status. This course gave me a way to observe from a third party perspective and really process the difference between productive strain, which can sharpen decision-making under deadline, and the erosive stress that erodes and exhausts judgment, even before it becomes visible to oneself or anyone else.
Leading and Managing Change (MGT4220, Innovation and Change Management)
Change Management covered established models of organizational change, from Kotter’s stages to resistance theory, and examined why change efforts succeed or stall. The material was most useful where it addressed change under resource constraint. Most organizational change literature assumes a baseline of stability and, if not frofligate resources, at least sufficient ones, but all the organizations I have worked in have been chronically underfunded in both money and time, and nonprofits rarely have resources of any kind to spare. Rebuilding a dissolved board, or converting a legacy publication’s revenue model without disrupting its editorial independence, both required exactly the kind of sequenced, designed, patient change management this course framed.
Leading Teams Locally and Virtually (CMN1100, Organizational Communication)
This course covered organizational communication theory, including how information moves through formal and informal channels, and how communication breaks down differently in co-located versus distributed teams. Managing staff and contractors across Tacoma, Ashland, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, and other remote locations, including the East Coast simultaneously means that messages needs different delivery timing and communication styles depending on whether a team member is in the room or three time zones away. The course’s distinction between transmission and understanding, that a message being sent is not the same as it being received correctly, has been a recurring, practical check against assuming what I intend to communicate is what actually is received, and has helped me recognize when and how those messages can sometimes be miscommunited.that isn’t actually there.
Evidence Based Leadership & Decision Making (LDR3400, Evidence Based Leadership)
Ever since I took this course I have found myself insisting that decisions be made within evidence based frameworks grounded in data, rather than in intuition or precedent. It takes more effort to gather data and evidence to make decisions without relying on instinct, but I have found that the extra time is worth spending in almost every case. We also covered evaluating the quality and relevance of evidence to particular decisions, and thought through what theat means carefully. That discipline runs directly against the automatic kind of decision making (instinct-driven) which is faster but generally all but indefensible to a board, a funder, or a grant reviewer. Applying it in practice has been challenging but effective, and requires building the habit of gathering and analyzing evidence before committing limited resources.
Leadership Capstone Project (LDR4850)
The capstone was the XN Project, a team engagement comparing the applied value of IT certifications against traditional college degrees in the technology job market, sponsored by Lake Washington Institute of Technology. The project required synthesizing primary data (job postings, employer and student surveys) with secondary sources (BLS data, industry reports, peer-reviewed studies) into findings an external sponsor could act on, which is a different discipline than writing for an instructor alone. It also required functioning as part of a five-person team with divided sections that had to connect into one coherent argument, a structure that mirrors coordinating across the multiple organizations under this portfolio’s Experience page.
Program awards
Dean’s List, all semesters (six). 3.980 institutional GPA through Spring 2026.