Please meet our Featured Fellow, Shamira Azlan!
Orginally from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Shamira Azlan will graduate from UNCG in Decem
ber 2016 with majors in marketing and entrepreneurship. This summer, Shamira is interning downtown in the beautiful Charles Aris Inc. building. Shamira’s dream job is to be the Chief Marketing Officer of a company dedicated to bettering the lives of people and cities, and in her free time, she enjoys graphic design and yoga.
Shamira shares about her internship experience thus far: It is my sixth week at Charles Aris Inc., an executive search firm located in the heart of Downtown Greensboro. I am here 3-4 times a week and in that time have learned more about the professional world than I have in a classroom setting. With my internship focus being in graphic design and digital marketing, I have allowed myself to push the boundaries of professional marketing, while constantly learning along the way. With my prior graphic design experience focused on entertainment (I worked for a beer festival in the summer of 2015), this experience has allowed me to test a more professional approach to design and marketing. It has also taught me how to truly think about the culture and image of a company – and how important that is to uphold. With half of the summer left in my internship here with Charles Aris, I am excited to further develop my skills and keep creating professional relationships.
Shamira shares about her experience at The Leonard Kaplan Leadership Institute: Looking around the room that morning, I realized that almost, if not all of us have gone through some sort of leadership training – whether it be through professional or social organizations, and whether it was recommended or not on our own accord. Either way, we were all eager for the two day journey we embarked on at The Leonard Kaplan Leadership Institute. Being placed in a room with over 30 other eager young professionals is a frightening but exciting thought- we were to be the first cohort of the Opportunity Greensboro Fellows Program. The diversity of the room itself was not unknown. We all came from different schools, cultural backgrounds and upbringings. What could I possibly have in common with some of my fellow cohort members?
On Day 2, we participated in an interesting exercise called the social identity circle. It evaluated the given, chosen and core characteristics of an individual’s identity. This exercise personally went beyond knowing what made me a leader because it allowed me to think about why I chose to do the things I did. As a college freshmen, I head started the first Oxfam America charter on UNCG’s campus, and I attended the week-long CHANGE conference to focus on social change on a domestic and international level. At 19, I led citizenship classes for aspiring US Citizens. Despite knowing where my volunteerism heart lay, I never truly understood why I chose to do the things I did. The social identity circle not only let me identify my core, but allowed me to share my findings with fellow peers that connected with me more than I thought we could.
