President of Emerge creates her own path through involvement

Sydney Nicholas, a fourth-generation Auburn student, was hesitant to come to The Plains because she didn’t want to be seen as merely following in her family’s footsteps.

However, among other reasons, student involvement allowed Nicholas to undoubtedly carve her own path.

Nicholas recently had this path recognized as she was named Female Student Leader of the Year at the 2018 Involvement Awards for serving as the first president of Emerge this past year.

After dropping a class in her first semester as a freshman, Nicholas began her long relationship with involvement. She wanted to fill her time with something that was just as meaningful as class, so she joined Dance Marathon.

As her involvement increased, Nicholas simultaneously grew as a person. As her roles and responsibilities grew, she eventually became president of Dance Marathon as a junior.

Nicholas said she loved her time as president of Dance Marathon, but she decided to step down to allow someone else to have the same great experience she had as president.

At the time, she thought this would be the end of her leadership in student organizations, and she would support from afar.

However, at the end of the semester, Lady Cox, assistant vice president for Student Affairs, approached Nicholas about a new student organization that the University was developing.

Nicholas was never expecting Emerge to be an option for her, but she decided to pursue it because of the amazing goal behind the organization.

“It was this idea that I learned so much with Dance Marathon, and I learned so much about Auburn leadership with other student leaders that I was like, ‘How cool would it be to set the foundation for all these other programs if we can equip people to be leaders,” Nicholas said.

According to its website, Emerge is a leadership journey that attempts to solve problems on and off campus.

The mission is to create leaders on campus and for years to come outside of school. [The organization] replaced Freshmen Leadership Program.

Many of the lessons Nicholas learned with Dance Marathon translated into what she has done with Emerge. However, serving as president of a new organization presented different challenges than being president of an already established organization.

“It seems like a natural transition from being there and doing it to setting a curriculum for how we, as Auburn men and women, really think about leadership in the early days,” Nicholas said.

One of the most special takeaways from the year is how the leaders of all the teams formed the identity of an organization.

“We saw the strength of the Auburn Family,” Nicholas said. “In my memory it was like, ‘We are going to beta test a 1,000-person program that nobody has seen before.’ I learned a lot about what it means to be a part of Auburn’s campus. I think our students got to experience that too, in terms of being on the forefront of something that’s different than what any other university offers.”

Nicholas said Emerge came about not because administration thought it would be a good idea but because administration heard feedback from students, which is representative of Nicholas’ approach to leadership.

She said she has learned that the mark of a good leader is to be able to listen.

The Emerge teams have seen their work come to fruition this year with 34 individual projects. However, Nicholas is excited to see how Emerge has given the skills to students who will become leaders of the future.

Nicholas will be graduating next week with a degree in global studies. As most college graduates do, she will be continuing the search for a job but will be getting married to another Auburn graduate in the coming summer.

She said she was thrilled with how Emerge has developed over the year. She is excited to see how her experiences with student involvement will play a role in her life and how other students will create their own path.

“One day, who knows, the SGA president could have been in Emerge,” Nicholas said. “The next founder of an on-campus organization could have been in Emerge. I’m really hopeful for when I come back to Auburn in five years, I’m seeing students who I may have not met but participated in our program and having program alumni out in the world killing it —killing the game.”