I chose to work for Manna Soup Kitchen, and my group was given the task to rebuild, improve, and expand the Backpack Program. This program supplies students and families who are food insecure with bags of food for the weekends, as some kids only have access to meals during the week at school. However, this program has been facing some challenges over the years such as the lack of advertisement and communication between manna and the schools, not nutritional, difficult to eat, and inconsistent foods, and the large amount of stigma surrounding food insecurity. All of these things have impacted the program in a negative way. We Interviewed 9 schools and collected information on how successful the program is at each individual school and why. We put all of this data into a report to give back to Manna so that they can improve the program.
Big Takeaways Sophomore inspire week helped me realize that not only do I like interacting with people, I also love to make an impact on them and the community through interacting with people. I learned how to stay calm and keep myself composed when speaking with people who weren't very kind. I also found that creativity is a very useful skill to have when working on a project that you or other people don't know a lot about. When we first began the project, we weren't given a lot of information on it. All we knew was that it wasn't very successful, and the people at Manna Soup Kitchen didn't even know what happened to the bags after they left the building. We decided to set up interviews with some schools to figure out some general information about how the program worked, and we collected data and feedback from every interview. Going into this project, we didn't know exactly what we were doing, and we didn't expect our final product to be as good as it was. In the end, we actually made a huge impact on the program within Manna, and the individual schools we went to.
Connections Between School and Work In school, I often have trouble getting started on things I don't know exactly how to do. Since the curriculum at our school is often very open-ended, I get unnecessarily stressed out because I don't know where to start. During sophomore inspire week, I was stressed in the beginning, but it felt easier to just jump into it because it was a real world project. Even though we didn't have a lot of information, we just started trying different things, asking questions, and scheduling interviews. This allowed the whole process to run a lot more smoothly because we just started doing things, and we came up with ideas from there. This helped me realize that instead of struggling to find a place to start on any project in school, I should just jump into it and come up with ideas and new solutions as I go.
Time Management Being effective with time management during this project was quite difficult especially because of how many interviews we had scheduled in only three days. At first we were unsure of how we were going to compile our findings into something we could give back to Manna, because we didn't have a lot of time to do things. We ended up deciding to build a report, and divide the work up among our group. Each of us wrote a separate report for the notes on the interviews from each individual school, and put it all into one document, along with another report on the general information about how the project was working. We found this to be a very effective way to manage our time well, and we got more work done in three days than we thought we would.
Connections to YouScience My YouScience results show that I am a senquential thinker, meaning the way I mentally organize things helps me create a sequential, linear, and systematic planning approach that allows me to make accurate logical deductions and find it easy to explain to others how the pieces of a plan fit together. I definitely found this to be true during our project, because I did a lot of the scheduling and planning for the interviews, and I found that part of the project to be especially fun for me. My YouScience results also show that I am a Blended Liaison, meaning I'm flexible in both my approach to work and my interaction style, and I'm able to step in and fill whichever role is needed on a team because I am equally comfortable leading and following. I also found this to be true during the project, because through I love working with people, when I was asked to help out with the report that was being created, I was able to sit down and write the report for one of the middle schools. I had no problem with completing it, even though I had a lot more fun interacting with people and making phone calls.
Advice for Future Students Don't worry about what your friends are choosing, worry about what you want to do and your interests, because you'll have a lot more fun with your project in the end, and you might get to collaborate with new people that you don't normally interact with. If you are given an open-ended task that you don't know a lot about and you're unsure of where to begin, just jump into it and come up with ideas and new solutions as you go. This will allow the whole process to run a lot more smoothly, and things will start to make a lot more sense towards the end. Be optimistic about the project and group you're put into, because even if you're skeptical about things, everything will most likely end up okay at the end. You might be able to create something that everyone's proud of and leave a long-lasting impact on the community if you just think positive and apply yourself. When things get stressful, take a break! Sometimes leaving things alone for a bit and giving yourself a break can help your ideas flow a lot more smoothly, and you can produce your best work.