Leader of the Pack is a highly coveted award given to NC State students who fully realize the university’s ideals of community leadership and service.

The recipient is announced from a semi-finalist group of six students at the annual homecoming football game after enduring a long selection process comprising resume submissions, interviews, presentations and a student body vote.

The Technician sat down with Kati Scruggs, a junior from Belmont, North Carolina studying applied nutrition and women’s and gender studies, to discuss the goals, motivation and future plans of NC State’s 2016 Leader of the Pack.

What do you want to do after you graduate?

That is a fantastic question. I am intending on going to grad school eventually. I’d like to get my master’s in public health, and I’d also like to get my RD (registered dietitian). But I’m probably going to take a bit of time off and maybe do the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps.

What/who is your greatest inspiration?

I feel like this is a classic answer, but totally my mom. I just want to be her when I grow up. She’s really cool and has lived in a bunch of different places. She grew up on an island in Canada and then moved to Bermuda and then spent some time in Japan and now she’s here. She just does what she wants to do and when she does it, she does it wholeheartedly.

What organizations and activities are you involved in?

My two big ones are the Krispy Kreme Challenge and A PACKed Kitchen. A PACKed Kitchen trains NC State students to be nutrition instructors and supports them as they teach cooking and nutrition classes in the community. I’m also on the club swim team and a Park Scholar. I do some other things here and there, but those are the big ones.

What is the application and voting process for Leader of the Pack?

There is the initial application which has the long essay that is pretty in-depth about one aspect of your leadership in a particular organization. I talked about the Krispy Kreme Challenge. It also asks about service, a time that we failed and of course the basic stuff like GPA, graduation year and typical stuff like that. That’s the general application.

They then review those and choose 12 semi-finalists, and the 12 semi-finalists do a presentation and interview. You give a 10-minute presentation about yourself and your service with no visual aids or anything. Just you in front of a panel with them asking you questions. Then there are the six finalists and that’s when you get to the student body vote. A common myth is that when you get to the six finalists, the student body determines the winner, but the vote only counts for 15 percent of your final score. They factor in your original application, essays, presentation, GPA and the student voting.

The panel is made up a various people in the university like Mike Mullen.

Where did you originally hear about Leader of the Pack?

I actually heard about it freshman year. I knew some people that were finalists or semi-finalists and I remember seeing them go on the football field, watching them campaign, seeing them in the parade and reading stories in the Technician and thinking ‘That is so cool, they are so cool and I want to be like them.’ Now it’s just a really cool moment, I’ve kind of come full-circle.

Why did you want to apply?

It circles back to what I just said. There are two answers to this question. I remember seeing all of this happen freshman year and thinking like ‘Wow, that’s so cool.’ I think it’s so cool that our university has recognized leadership and service in this way. It’s kind of a play on the regular homecoming thing with so much more substance.

Also, it’s been on my college bucket list to go on the football field during a game and this felt like a really good way to do it.

Leader of the Pack is fundamentally a system to choose a very dedicated student leader on campus. In what ways does your leadership affect students?

That’s a hard one. I’m a leader in a few different organizations and a few different contexts, but no matter what context, my goal as a leader is to empower the people around me and to allow them to have concrete contributions and help them use their strengths.

Everyone has different strengths and if I do everything, first of all I can’t do everything and second of all I shouldn’t because you can do some things better than I can and I can do some things better than you can. Everything just works better if we are all working together.

I hope that my impact as a leader has been to activate those around me and allow them to benefit the community in the same way I have been able to, kind of like a ripple effect.

In what ways will you continue to lead until graduation?

It won’t be totally business as usual. I am an executive director for the Krispy Kreme Challenge and I will definitely be on board for the rest of this year in that role. But I will not have that role next year in the Krispy Kreme Challenge, I am intending to step back a bit. I’ll serve as an adviser and I’ll definitely still be involved, but let someone else take up that position.

I’ll continue to be involved with A PACKed Kitchen this year and next year as well, but I’ll be stepping back a little bit and not be as heavily involved.

I’m kind of excited to branch out a little. I’ve invested a lot of my time into these things over the past three years. Next year, I really want to coach for Girls on the Run and I’d like to try a few new things on campus. I’m looking forward to getting myself into some new spaces.

What is the most important advice you can give to aspiring leaders?

Be intentional. Leadership is hard and it’s something you have to work at. If you’re in a really hard class, you study and after you take a test you need to stop and think about what went well and what didn’t go well. Leadership is the same way.

You need to think about what you’re doing right and you need to critically think about what you did wrong. Get feedback from people around you just like you get feedback from professors. I think feedback is huge and it’s hard to ask for feedback because you don’t want to hear what you aren’t doing correctly, but you’ll be so much better for it.