Final reflection

 

All things considered, I have to say senior project was successful. I wish I could say it was a relaxing fun week but honestly it was a stressful grind for me trying to log hours for senior project while juggling my capstone project. This is now my fifth paper written in the last thirty six hours with a total page tally of 18 if you count these three. I do not mean to sound negative when writing this though. I was able to learn a lot from the experience both from admissions and from my capstone. And to add from that I learned how difficult being an event coordinator can be especially at proctor. Welp, we finished our first week of senior project. It was a roller coaster ride for us as what we anticipated when signing up for this project was not what it boiled down to be. Back in early spring we created “Senior Baganza” in hopes of getting students out at night having fun on campus. We wanted to do water wars, basketball tournaments, bonfires and much more. As we spent the first couple days of the project figuring out which events we wanted to put on we quickly realized that we were up against much bigger obstacles than we had mapped out. First of all, as senior event coordinators, it is very tough to get hours at a boarding school when events can only be put on at night. As any who reads this blog is probably aware of, students at proctor have very busy schedules and very little free time to be outside the dorm having fun. As I said we spend most of the first day trying to come up with ideas and plans for how to do our project. It was easy coming up with things we wanted to do. Those ideas were constantly streaming in. We quickly ran into walls when living through the fact that the majority of senior projects get hours during class time. That was not an option for us, since students cannot attend events when they have class, obviously. Which left us with the question of what we are going to do in the morning. For me it worked out well in terms of my capstone because for the first three days that is what I spent the bulk of my time working on. Our plan was that since we couldn’t work in the morning we would get our hours at the events at night. So, Monday night we put on a bonfire outside slocumb and tried to pull people in by providing stuff for S’mores. I think at its best there were twelve kids that showed up. We took it as a start. The next night there simply was zero time to do it. Kids get out of class at 2:45, practice starts at 3:15, we get out of practice and go straight to dinner and on that Tuesday there was play practice right after dinner up until 7:15 which of course was followed by the 7:30 in dorm time. We considered doing something for just seniors, but half the seniors are off campus and the ones that are here would be very tough to pull something together with because of numbers and unwillingness/wanting to participate. Same story again Wednesday, with a game where we left before class got out and got back, ate dinner and headed for the dorm. We had plenty of awesome ideas we were super excited about, but there was literally zero time in our schedules to do it anytime and if there were the kids that we would need to participate were busy or occupied with more pressing commitments. So we dropped the project. And now we are Alicia's interns which consists of random stuff around the admissions building and tours which they seem to greatly appreciate the help with. On top of that my capstone is coming along well which I am very excited about.Our second week of senior project went a lot smoother than the first. After teaming up with Alicia our group has been off and running. I will say working with Alicia has worked well for me especially for trying to multitask between senior projects and my capstone project. I have had tremendous hours of work on this capstone project and a large part of me wishes I had just made that my senior project but it is okay because I am getting through it and getting both where they need to be. Alicia has been very helpful though in the sense that she understands there are times I will be free and times I won’t and she makes an effort to figure out when those times are rather than just saying I need you here now, with the assumption that I have nothing better to do. On top of that our project has turned out to be quite enjoyable as well as beneficial. Alicia does a good job of giving us tasks that are suited well for what we are capable of doing in terms of admissions. I say this because admissions is the face of the school to people outside our community and so a lot of the things they do need to be done very well because it is a lot of the school’s reputation on the line. Because of this a lot of what admissions does would not be realistically a good task for high school students for example putting out information about the school online or giving input on the day to day functionality of their office. This means a lot of what we do is involved with what admissions does on campus. This means a lot of tours, connecting with students, building infographics for students when they come to campus, things of that nature. She also let us sit and help with a lot of the green key stuff. It has also been cool to learn about more of what admissions does in their process of selecting kids and things they are considering in applicants as well as choosing the process and criteria in admissions processes. All in all, I was happy I got the opportunity to do this project. It was a nice way to end off my high school career.