Leadership Fellows Program
No one wakes up one day and is decidedly a leader; the path to becoming one is a lifelong journey. It is filled with learning and self-awareness. Leadership is also about identifying your motivations and values - in other words, your why. Our Leadership Fellows Program encompasses these tenets and uniquely combines them with legal instruction to educate lawyers with a leadership mindset. Society needs lawyers with vision and values, who inspire others, and make a positive impact on the world around us.
Our program, launched in 2019, was developed by Dean April Barton and a team of dedicated faculty and staff. Deliberately reflecting on Principles of Leadership, moral values and our high-quality education, we have created a distinctive program that commits to leadership excellence.
At the heart of our Leadership Fellows Program is the resolve to inspire our future lawyers. The program aims at accompanying budding legal expertise with the ability and the mindset to go into the world to meaningfully lead and serve others.
Students who belong to the program participate in sessions geared toward developing leadership characteristics. They take an intrinsic look at their own values while similarly discovering the traits of successful leaders.
Sessions aim at understanding how to make informed decisions and navigate crisis and conflict. Professional skills are further honed with lessons that include bringing leadership skillsets to job interviews. Our Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University alumni contribute to many of these sessions sharing their experience and advice for creating a vision and motivating others.
Our program was conscientiously designed recognizing that lawyers serve in positions where they lead and make influential decisions. The decisions they render impact teams, clients, and organizations. They also influence regulations and policy. Appreciating the complexity of how all decisions are woven together is a significant component of leadership.
Our goal is for our fellows to acquire and recognize the competence, poise, honesty, inspiration, vision, resiliency, and focus that comprise a leader. We commit to providing our fellows with the tools to push them in an upward trajectory that uses their legal expertise to serve the common good and create a better world for all.