{"id":22422,"date":"2025-05-28T01:30:40","date_gmt":"2025-05-28T07:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=22422"},"modified":"2025-05-26T14:12:47","modified_gmt":"2025-05-26T20:12:47","slug":"leila-brickley-gets-creative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/28\/leila-brickley-gets-creative\/","title":{"rendered":"Leila Brickley Gets Creative"},"content":{"rendered":"

Graduating Senior Explores The Many Ways To Lead<\/i><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

By Mark Dee<\/em><\/p>\n

Entering her junior year at Wood River High School, Leila Brickley found herself a few credits ahead of the class. With room to maneuver, she paused to consider other ways to learn. The Hailey senior kept coming back to a shopworn idea, true in the ways that cliches so often are: Travel is the best education. So, she found a program, enrolled, and soon sat in a kitchen of a host family in Guatemala, living life in her second language.<\/p>\n

After thirteen years in the Blaine County School District\u2019s Dual Immersion program, on paper Brickley knew a lot about Latin America. Being there, she was amazed by how much it more of it there was to discover.<\/p>\n

\u201cGuatemala is a pretty small country, and there are, like, 20 or 30 countries in Latin America? This is just a little small slice of it. But every town we went to was so different and unique. Every city, every group of people we talked to, like, it was almost overwhelming, just going to all these places and realizing just how much more is always out there and how many more amazing places there are to explore.\u201d<\/p>\n

As her groups de facto translator, she found out about herself in her first extended trip away from the Wood River Valley.<\/p>\n

\u201cI learned that I\u2019m more capable in a crisis or in uncertainty than I thought I was,\u201d she said. \u201cI thought I\u2019d be so nervous, if any little things went wrong, and that I\u2019d be looking to other people to solve [problems]. But I think I took on more leadership roles and more proactive roles, especially being able to speak Spanish.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the years ahead, Brickley will explore those aspects of herself\u2014in the wider world, and across her own country\u2014as one of 27 students new in the Robertson Scholars Leadership Program at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The scholarship covers all her expenses and funds summer travel and study abroad. Her first trip will be on a project in the rural American South, a place she knows about as well as she did Guatemala before her trimester there. She can study whatever she wants\u2014for Leila, likely something in humanities; meanwhile, the program offers tutelage and support for scholars hoping to understand the many ways they might change the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

When she met her cohort in April, she felt at home.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey talk about this idea of purposeful leadership, and understanding what different kinds of leadership look like\u2014how to create change, how to listen to other people and try to understand before diving in. That there\u2019s this community that feels very purposeful and very focused around these goals was incredible to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she got home and described it to her father, Jason, he saw the fit right away.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt just sounds like it\u2019s made for you,\u201d Leila recalls him saying.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because, for all her individual skills, Brickley has always been her best with like-minded people by her side. She\u2019s a writer, a dancer, and a violinist. But her vision of creativity isn\u2019t of an isolated artist executing a singular vision. It\u2019s a Footlight recital, dancing with the same girls she has for years, each finding something in themselves to tell a story together. It\u2019s workshopping a poem, like she did last year at the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop, drawing on different perspectives to get the words just right. It\u2019s playing in the Wood River Orchestra. \u201cYou can\u2019t really pick out your own voice from the crowd, or the sound of your own instrument,\u201d she said of performances. \u201cYou almost aren\u2019t even sure how it comes together, but when you\u2019re on stage, it\u2019s the most incredible, focused, beautiful sound that you get to create for people. It\u2019s not very showy, but it\u2019s just gorgeous.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Leadership can be like that, too. She\u2019s seen it in her teachers, who have set examples, sometimes \u201cin very quiet ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not always being a person in the front of the classroom,\u201d she said. \u201cIt can be the person pushing people forward and encouraging from the back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually, Brickley may consider law school. For now, though, she\u2019s keeping an open mind\u2014which, after all, is what leadership, like creativity, is all about.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis idea that leadership is a flexible concept\u2014that it can look different and manifest itself in different ways\u2014is so similar to the way I approach the arts. Because no one person creates something the same way as someone else, and embracing that is just so important for creating anything.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Graduating Senior Explores The Many Ways To Lead By Mark Dee Entering her junior year at Wood River High School, Leila Brickley found herself a few credits ahead of the class. With room to maneuver, she paused to consider other ways to learn. The Hailey senior kept coming back to a shopworn idea, true in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22423,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,74,18,32],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22422","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-community","8":"category-education","9":"category-news","10":"category-schools"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22422"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22424,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22422\/revisions\/22424"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}