Fall 2026 Winner of the Leadership Excellence Scholarship

Alexander Koennecke

The Fall 2026 Leadership Excellence Scholarship has been awarded to Alexander Koennecke. Alexander is an Economics major and Entrepreneurship minor at the University of Houston. While serving as Interfraternity Council President, Alexander learned the importance of empowering others, building trust, and improving communication.

Read Their Essay Here:

"Leaders aren't born; they are made." Vince Lombardi's words changed the way I thought about leadership. A leader isn't chosen by talent or title. A leader is someone who decides to step up and do the hard things most people avoid. That decision, made over and over, is what shapes a person into a leader. In my time as the Interfraternity Council President, I learned that three qualities make that decision possible: empowerment, humility, and dedication. Together, they didn't just help me lead, but they made me a better version of myself.

A leader's real job isn't to do the work themself. It's to make sure everyone around them believes their work matters. Without that belief, an organization stalls. People show up but stop caring, and morale quietly fades until no one is pushing in the same direction. As IFC President, I saw this firsthand when I was elected to office. Many chapters were unhappy with how IFC was run and demanded change. Instead of taking over and fixing it myself, I gave my council board real ownership over the outcome and the authority to make decisions, not just carry out mine. As a result, we came up with a new communication platform, Flare. This new form of communication gave my board and the chapters transparency and enabled us to show the chapters that we were taking the initiative to improve operations throughout IFC. Many chapters began to earn our respect and became more willing to work with us. That experience taught me that empowerment isn't about stepping back and hoping things work out. It's about handing people responsibility and trusting them enough to let them rise to it.

If empowerment keeps an organization moving, humility is what keeps a leader honest. In my experience, this is the most important trait a leader can have. Not because it's comfortable, but because it's the best teacher available. Every leader makes mistakes. What separates a good leader from a great one is whether they are willing to own those mistakes and actually learn from them. During my presidency, I made plenty of mistakes. The one that sticks out to me most was the switch to a new recruitment system. From the start, everything backfired, and nothing went as I had planned. This ultimately led to one of the worst recruitment semesters we have seen since COVID. It would have been easy to make excuses or quietly move on. Instead, I owned it in front of the council, asked for feedback, and changed my approach. That moment stung, but I also earned something I couldn't have gotten any other way. The trust of people who saw that I could be wrong and still lead. My humility didn't make me look weaker as a president; it made the people around me more willing to follow.

Empowerment and humility only matter if a leader shows up to practice them, day after day, especially on the days they don't feel like it. Dedication is the quality that makes the other two sustainable. It's not a burst of motivation; it's discipline paired with the flexibility to adapt when the plan stops working. As president, that meant setting clear, concrete goals for IFC, such as rebuilding relationships between the university and the chapters and building real plans to achieve them. There were many weeks when it would have been easier to let something slide. When our advisor was fired, I had an even heavier load of work to bear. We lost support from our department and were left in the dust. But I kept showing up, kept adjusting the plan when circumstances changed, and kept pushing IFC toward what I knew it could be. By the end of my term, morale was at an all-time high, and chapters were finally starting to get along. I also ended up winning the "IFC Man of the Year" award for my hard work and was personally appointed by the Vice President of Student Affairs to help rebuild the failing Student Government Association. To this day, I am still recognized for my hard work and unwavering dedication to my position.

Lombardi was right that leaders are made, but I'd add that they're made in the small moments when doing the easy thing and doing the right thing pull in opposite directions. Empowerment taught me that leadership isn't about control. Humility taught me that mistakes are only failures if I don't learn from them. And dedication taught me that showing up matters more than feeling ready. These aren't traits I was born with; they're ones I had to practice, fail at, and rebuild, one step at a time. I am continuing that process of learning in my everyday life, and I wouldn't want it any other way.