Our Story

LTI was founded in the spring of 2007 by YeSeul Kim (pictured right) and Semmie Kim, then first-year students at MIT. Our mission statement was:

“The MIT Leadership Training Institute will be a self-sustaining leadership program that teaches motivated college and high school students the philosophy behind leadership, the importance of teamwork, and the significance of self-reflection with the comprehension of self-identity.”

The founding members of LTI were greatly and positively influenced by mentors when they were high school students, and wished to pass on that wisdom. Despite having only 4 members by the end of the Spring 2007 semester, the program became very successful, and numbered over 20 by the fall.

Today, we are guided largely by the same principles that enabled the early success of the program. LTI still remains a student-run and student-led organization, sustaining a cycle of mentorship. Once our mentors are experienced with the program, they can take positions on our executive board, and help run the logistics of LTI. Of course, the goal of our organization has remained the same: help high school students find their inner leader through a series of leadership development exercises, and put those skills into practice by overseeing their own community service project. Over the years, we have found new ways to achieve these goals for our students. Originally, there were only ‘mentors’, who worked with the same students for both parts of the program. Now, we have Leadership Mentors (LMs) and Project Mentors (PMs), who receive specialized training for either leadership building or community service project development.

For the next several years, the number of high school students who did LTI grew. We started with 8 students in the first iteration of the program, and can now proudly count 50 LTI students in our program each year. With this spectacular growth came a number of modifications to our curriculum. We developed a stronger sense of what worked, and what needed to be improved. We are happy to say that we have utilized this experience by updating our curriculum for the 2020 session of LTI and beyond. But through the years, we have remained dedicated to our founding mission statement, and are excited to continue to see what future experience can teach us about effectively building the leadership structures our students will need to guide the world of tomorrow.