Sophomore Inspire Week
What I did Over Inspire Week
What Is It:
​Sophomore inspire week is a week ​where the sophomore grade takes a break from their normal academic classes to do community service projects out in our community. These projects involve various career fields, to help us explore what we may be interested in for future careers in early adulthood. ​
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Project Description:
​I worked with the Juniper School in their beginning stages of designing a playground space for their new building. My group worked with staff, students and parents at Juniper to collect as much data as possible for the play space. We then started to fabricate rough draft designs on paper for the two staff members responsible for this project to look over and critique. After this we started on a budget sheet for everything on the designs. We also drew up big scale models on paper and began to contact businesses to see if they would donate to the project. I helped with interviewing teachers to see their standpoints. I also drew out the rough draft of the blacktop area and then later drew out the scale drawings of the blacktop and garden area. I also assisted in working on the budget sheet.
Project Reflection:
Big Takeaways:
Throughout the week I learned how to draw in depth scale drawings, work with teachers, parents and kids to hear their needs. I was also able to connect with my classmates and deepen our collaboration skills. Talking with teachers and parents in particular about what they were looking for helped us with our designs, it allowed us to be practical and but still accommodating. As for scale drawings this is something I will keep with me for awhile. They are pretty challenging to make sure that the scale of it is correct. You have to break it up into different components to understand where everything goes.
Connections Between School and Work:
I was able to take my collaboration skills from previous group projects into this project. We broke into three smaller groups within our whole group in order to accomplish everything. Even though I was in a smaller group of three, we all still had to communicate with each other to make sure there wasn’t overlap or any extra confusions for our overall design. During the design process with my area the blacktop we had to draft small scale drawings and then transfer those to much bigger paper. I did two of the large scale drawings, this skill I won’t be forgetting anytime soon. Even though it was difficult the art of drawing scale layouts is valuable. Especially because I’ve been looking at going into a design or science field. I’ll be able to use this skill to my advantage in other design projects, even if it's not scale drawings and something more digital.
​Time Management:
Time management is something I don’t struggle with. It’s not hard to look at what needs to be done, how much time there is to complete the task and then plan backwards from there. As a group we made a plan at the beginning of everyday working through it with us regrouping mid day to see what we’ve done and if the plan needed to be modified. I feel like this helped everything be able to stay on task more because we weren’t struggling to figure out what needed to be done. Managing everything didn’t feel as hard as the time crunch did. All of us had to work diligently everyday because if we didn’t it wasn’t going to get done. I feel that all of us were super motivated with the work, so staying on task and using our time well wasn’t
much of a issues. There were times that I needed to just lay on a couch or the ground for a second to give my brain a break from doing everything. At the end of the week I was thoroughly exhausted from doing design work, to budgeting to talking with parents, teachers and kids.
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Connections to YouScience:
My highest aptitude was brainstormer. The definition says I think on my feet quickly, enjoy creative environments and fast paced work. I feel that this is pretty true, I don’t like work that feels dragged out or useless. I love the opportunity to be creative within many different forms. For this project I was the whole design process with the scale drawings and planning what would be in each space. The project was quite fast paced because of the limited amount of time we had. I both liked and disliked this because it was a bit more stressful but also didn’t leave me bored or uninterested.
Advice to Future Students:
Advice I would give is to stay open to an amazing experience. Don’t immediately think it’s going to suck and not benefit you. The chances are you're going to learn new skills, deepen old ones, connect with new people and have the ability to do something meaningful for your community. Even if you have a project that you are not very interested in try to find something in it that you are interested in. This will keep you on task and help you grow as a person without being bored and unmotivated. The projects are designed for growth and experience, so take advantage of that and learn some cool things.
Master Budget Sheet We Made
Presentation Slideshow