Katie Kenney

I am a hardworking student of Chinese and Resource Economics at the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts-- Amherst.

Outside of school my real passion is dance. During High School I was one of the 7 original members of the InsideOut Senior Dance Company. I continued dancing with the company until my High Schoool Graduation in 2011. I have continued dance at the University as a Silver/Gold level competitive dancer for the UMass Ballroom Dance Team. I served a term as the team's Costume and Shoes Coordinator and am currently serving as the Competition Coordinator for the team.

Performance dancing and competitive dancing have each developed different skillsets as a dancer and as a person. Performance dancing really helped me learn to think outside the box and also to have a clear direction, audience and message in mind with everything one is presenting to the public. Competitive dancing maintains very strict syllabus, so it gives you a much smaller window to individualize. It's taught an attention to detail and valuation of the simple and correct over the elaborate. The way to win in competition dance is not necessarily to do fancy moves, but rather to do what you do extremely cleanly and correctly. Such is also the way with life. It also taught me a sense of teamwork that I had never experienced as a performance dancer-- because you and your partner are moving as one unit it does require one to learn to communicate productively and consistently with a partner even when figures are not working correctly. This is a real world skill that translates well to almost every other discipline.
As a member of the Ballroom Team's Board I have been able to learn skills for working as a committee. I have also been able to discover my own talent as an innovator and have been personally responsible for a lot of the changes and developments the team has made within the last several years. This list includes developing a mentoring program which more than doubled our newcomer renention rate, amassing more than $6000 of donations and $10,000 worth of loans for the team as Costumes and Shoes Coordinator, and currently planning the first ever Minuteman Dancesport Classic for November 2 2014. I hope to carry this into an occupation where I will be given the freedom to innovate and help create big picture progress for future employers.