Just like the famous Pokémon trainer Ash Ketchum said, you gotta catch ‘em all. Culture around leadership at Deerfield is no different. Schools, internships, even friend groups glorify a student’s ability to be a rallying point in their community. You’ve probably seen leadership as the top skill listed on your friend’s LinkedIn page, and nothing sells better than a vaunted title that designates your importance to the rest of the world.

Being a Deerfield student can feel like a constant social obligation; days begin at a breakfast table loud with the voices of peers and end in a crowded bathroom as eight different people fight for a spot to brush their teeth and wash their faces. Classes in the humanities invariably rely on the Harkness Table model for facilitating discussion, and STEM curricula are laden with group projects and cooperative labs. On top of that, you have to charm, politic and brown-nose your way into positions such as Executive Head, Secretary General, Editor in Chief, and President for the sake of padding the activities section of your common app.

Oftentimes, it feels like success at Deerfield is measured in the titles that you can collect, with an emphasis on single top dog positions. But is this necessarily true?

We typically see titled leadership positions are akin to Pikachu: highly visible, unanimous with the Deerfield brand, and well equipped. However, Deerfield’s primary strength is its vast system of unrecognized leaders. While only those well acquainted with certain communities may know and appreciate them, these individuals are invaluable to Deerfield’s culture and student life. Upperclassmen who volunteer to lead their teams’ warmups, dormmates who take charge during biweekly clean-ups, and even senior members of friend groups count as examples of untitled leaders. These people are arguably just as or even more important than the club leaders, peer counselors, and proctors on our campus. They set the standard for new students as to what a Deerfield student should strive to be: kind, enthusiastic, helpful, and willing to step up to help others when they aren’t asked to. These less visible leaders set the culture, and oftentimes have greater social weight than any position one could put on a resume.

There’s a perception that leadership is only occupied by social butterflies that never stop talking until their throat runs dry—that is only part of the truth. Introverted students can easily fill these roles, seeing as there is no requirement to involve themselves in the highly social and often stressful environment of clubs and teams. While these less recognized roles aren’t appreciated on college applications or during sit-down announcements, they are still important for our community. Extroverted students are naturally advantaged by the structure of Deerfield titled leadership, but introverted students can succeed in whatever area they wish to.

While the Scroll is full of titled leadership positions, (nearly all of them being some variation of editor), we also rely on the leadership of the staff and contributing writers who put all of their time and effort into creating the best articles they are capable of. In our experiences, some of the best articles we have read, the articles that inspired us to dedicate a large portion of our own lives to this paper, were written by such writers. See Jazz Baker ’22’s article “My Grievances with the Girls Meeting” or Charlotte Halpin ’23’s “From Dance to Dump: Fashion Consumerism at Deerfield.”

As we begin the year, we encourage our readership to think about what leadership means in a school setting so focused on official titles, statistics, and school-sponsored initiatives. Leadership isn’t an ornament, it’s a responsibility, and oftentimes that responsibility manifests in ways that don’t have titles attached to them, but are equally important. It’s a door to higher opportunities, but also requires you to be a steward for the next person that comes through.