This past week the Caldwell Fellows program not only celebrated their 50th anniversary, but also named their class of 2021. Alumni from all over the United States and the world traveled to NC State to help conduct interviews and to attend the first Caldwell Fellows Alumni Conference in celebration of the program’s anniversary and achievements.
The Caldwell Fellows Program was started in 1968 by H. Smith Richardson and Robert Greenleaf when these men founded the Center for Creative Leadership and awarded grants to five North Carolina universities to start leadership development initiatives on the campuses. Of the five programs that were started, the Caldwell Fellows program is the only one of the five to remain actively operating and committed to the original vision.
“The Smith-Richardson Foundation got their money out of Vicks VapoRub, and they thought ‘we’ve got good money, what’re we going to do?’” said Janice Odom, director of the Caldwell Fellows Program. “And they thought we need more leaders in the world that are the kind of people that we want to see the world developing into, so they developed the Center for Creative Leadership.”
The Caldwell Fellows program focuses on developing community leaders that will be able to serve in their fields of interest, whether that be at NC State or in their future careers. This mission stems from the program’s original vision when it was created half a century ago.
“They [Smith and Richardson] had this vision of leadership and it is still what we are based on: servant-leadership, which is not the same thing as service,” Odom said.
The program does come with financial support and stipends for the fellows, but according to the fellows and the staff, the program is not about the financial aid.
“I would describe it more as a servant-leadership program,” said Kelsey Shevlin, a fourth-year Caldwell Fellow studying statistics. “It does come with a financial stipend and tuition support, but it is more a program than a scholarship.”
Based on these values, the program has named their class of 2021 this past week, which was particularly special this year as the selection activities overlapped with the first-ever alumni conference held by the program.
“It was our first year opening up the weekend to as many alumni that wanted to come or was possible instead of just the amount of interviewers that we need,” Shevlin said. “We had about twice as many alumni come in for the weekend than we normally have.”
In selecting students out of the pool of applicants, Odom discussed what can make a student stand out from other candidates.
“This program is not a prize for the fact that you have had good breaks and done well in school,” Odom said. “It’s really more of an investment in you, so we choose people that we think that we can develop into strong leaders with the capability to do that good, that really hard and well-informed work.
Sam Fedeler, a fourth-year Caldwell Fellow studying physics and computer science, also discussed what the program looks for in candidates.
“We are not just looking for the individual,” Fedeler said. “Community is really important to us, so, for example, during our selection day we do group interviews as well, and I got to work some on that as a senior interviewer, and in that, we really look at how potential Fellows engage with each other because that’s really important.”
The Fellows and staff are excited for the new class and are looking forward to seeing how the community develops, however, the decisions were not easy.
“I think the hard thing about selection is it’s not like there are 25 more people on this campus that should be Fellows, and nobody else should be,” Odom said. “It’s like that’s where we draw the line because we keep our class size intentionally at 25 because it is a learning community and if you get a lot bigger it’s hard to do that.”
The program’s administrators are looking forward to the next 50 years and the development of their mission and values through the development of student leaders on NC State’s campus.
