<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\tBy Scott Faust<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n Among the thousand students at North Branch Area High School, Josh Hatton <\/b>wasn’t one to stay after school for extracurricular activities.<\/span><\/p>\n His parents worked and couldn’t bring him home if he missed the regular bus. But a bigger obstacle was his own lack of interest.<\/span><\/p>\n Things hadn’t changed by the time Hatton started at Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ in 2012: “If you saw me as a freshman, I would be one of the quiet ones who didn’t ask a question,” he said.<\/span><\/p>\n Three years later, Hatton is president of the student Chemistry Club, a second-year student senator, a teaching assistant for two chemistry lab courses and a budding researcher. This summer he will work on a laser spectrascopy research project at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.<\/span><\/p>\n Now when he’s in class, Hatton said, “I’m willing to ask a question because I know if I’m confused, other people probably may not be understanding it, either.”<\/span><\/p>\n He is far from alone at Bemidji State in his transformation from self-containment to selflessness. In fact, his journey is remarkably similar to that of many other Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ students who’ve learned lessons and discovered strengths that will serve them all their lives.<\/span><\/p>\n Conversations with a cross-section of emerging student leaders reveal a common pathway that includes participation in academic clubs, opportunities to work directly with faculty and staff, and an ability to juggle such competing demands as jobs, intercollegiate athletics and undergraduate research. Scholarship support has been crucial for them as well.<\/span><\/p>\n “It’s not additive, it’s exponential,” Hanson said. “You can’t just add up the experiences and get an outcome. All these things, these points in time, come together in a complex formula, and out comes this mature young person.”<\/span><\/p>\n Nurturing leadership, in all its many forms, is so important at Bemidji State that the university next fall will launch its first academic program focused specifically on that goal. By combining existing electives in multiple majors with new courses to synthesize and apply a deeper understanding of leadership, students will be able to earn a minor or certificate in leadership.<\/span><\/p>\n “We are determined to give them as many tools of leadership as we can,” Hanson said, “and equally important, the opportunity to practice them.”<\/span><\/p>\n Students whom faculty identify as exemplary leaders frequently are able to look back and point to a pivotal moment when they first stepped up and spoke out – when Hanson’s algorithm began to work its calculus in their lives.<\/span><\/p>\n A<\/b><\/span>manda Wick<\/b>,<\/span> a 2015 Honors Program graduate from St. Cloud, glimpsed her own possibilities as she sat in a Business Club meeting, envying the ease with which the club president kept things moving.<\/p>\n “I thought it would be cool to do something like that, but in the back of my head, I said I could never do something like that,” recalled Wick, who majored in business administration with a double minor in psychology and information systems management.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a>President Richard Hanson says an unseen algorithm is at work, particularly when it comes to developing leaders out of students who may not have set the world on fire in high school.<\/span><\/p>\n