Senior Link Leader Caitlin Griffin was recently named a Link Crew Officer. She has learned and grown a lot throughout her years in the Link Leader program and is excited to once again motivate — not only incoming freshmen, but her fellow leaders.

“Last year I was really nervous because I didn’t know what my Link Crew would be like and I thought it was going to be really difficult to form a bond with them, but my Link Crew ended up being super awesome. They were all really talkative and super nice so I didn’t have as much of a problem as I was thinking that I would have. Once it got into the middle of the school year it was difficult to keep the connection up without as much Link Crew mandating stuff going on, but I had three of the girls in my advisor group and we [grew] super close. I still talk to most of the girls from my Link Crew so it was just a really great experience and I knew I wanted to be an officer.

I want to make attendance at events go up because last year at the beginning of the year we had a lot of people come, but by the end [there] wasn’t as many people attending. I just want to make the events more appealing to the freshmen so that they actually want to come.

There’s kind of this misconception that to be a Link Leader you have to be in love with Mercy and be super outgoing all the time and that’s just not true at all. If that were the case then I feel like that would almost discourage the freshmen because not everyone is like that and they’re going to feel like they can’t be successful if they’re not like that. You have to practice what you preach. You can’t pretend to be this perfect person but go off and not listen to any of it. It’s also important to show that you make mistakes. You don’t have to be perfect.

There’s lots of different types of Link Leaders. [Mrs. Brown] picks different personality types because that’s what the freshmen need. I had a tough time freshman year because I came from a small school to a really big school and I won’t say my Link Leader experience was awesome, because it wasn’t, but I learned what I needed from a Link Leader and wanted to give that to someone else.”