Blog 5

This year I have been doing a service learning project with Project Open Hand. It has been an experience that I will never forget. From the first day wondering how I am going to fit all the hours into an already crammed semester, to being sick for a week and coming to back and finding out that I have only completed seven of the required fifteen hours. To me the most rewarding element of the project was that it taught me how to manage my time better. At the end I felt very satisfied knowing that I not only completed the fifteen hours that I needed, I also completed and extra hour, and made a movie for the organization.

This experience will help me with my time management skills which will help me with everything in life. The programs that I used in making the movie (Photoshop, iMovie, Final Cut, and Sound Board) are programs that I had never used before and that I am now proficient at. Also, I had never used an Apple computer before, and now that I have done this project using primarily Apple computers, I have gained an invaluable wealth of knowledge about how they work. It is something that I will need to have in the workplace as well as for the rest of the years that I am in school.

I can see myself doing more volunteer work for Project Open Hand. I had a lot of fun doing it with my friends and would love to do it more with other people. However, I think that I would be more helpful to work for an organization that was not so developed. The movie that we made them, while helpful, is not something that they are in dyer need of, where as a less developed group would benefit from my new found skills more.

I have had a hard time connecting what the service learning project with what we are doing in the class. The history of sex and a discussion about what everyone thought about sex does not in my mind directly relate to packaging and delivering food to people that are sick. The one thing that I did notice about both the classroom discussion and the service learning project is that it made everyone think outside of the norm. The most interesting thing for me when I was doing the service learning project was how to coordinate four people’s extremely busy schedules to find time for all of us to drive in one car to deliver meals or make meals. Overall the project helped me to better understand that when you think out side of the box that things get done that you would never have though possible.

The project helped my woven communication skills because only one member of the group could talk to our contact at Project Open Hand. Through this one person we had to relay instructions and coordinate our actions. When I was making the movie I found that it was very time consuming at first to have to email Wojohn and then wait for him to email our contact at Project Open Hand, and then wait for him to email me back the response. It would take days to get a simple response about what type music she wanted to have playing in the background. I eventually learned how to look ahead in my project and know what I needed to ask her next so that I could ask the question a day or two in advance of when I needed the answer. It is something that I never thought that I would need to know how to do, but now that I have been exposed to it, I can see many times that I would need to use during the course of my life. One example of this is when I go to an interview or something to do with a professional job, and have to give a presentation. I need to be able to ask questions about what the presentation needs to have in it with out actually starting it. This process of learning how to look ahead has greatly increased the probability that I will be able to ask the correct questions when given an assignment of this nature.