Availability Status Paradox

It amazes me how we live in a world that is so attached to technology and social media especially, and yet we have such a hard time getting confirmation notices from people about scheduling events.

According to recent studies, Americans check social media on average of 17 times a day, which is about one time for every hour they’re awake. Furthermore, the average American spends about a third of their awake day on a phone. (4.7 hours out of the average 15 hours spent awake.) Yet with all of this time spent on phones, somehow we still manage to have a discouraging amount of people who are frightfully incompetent at virtual communication with project teams.

Kemps this year did not even get to finish the tournament because too many teams had a problem actually getting together to play their matches. This weekend is our spring showcase at Jump Start and I am still haven’t gymnasts last minute tell me that they won’t be there which means I’m constantly re-choreographing and coaching. All year when I would try to schedule meetings, so many people just don’t respond until last minute, or they forget to ask the right people if they can actually attend. It’s just crazy that people can’t organize and communicate their schedules.

Then you get the excuse, “oh I’m sorry I don’t understand how to work ____ in order to respond.” And this baffles me even more, because if you don’t know how to work something (which is hard to believe because communication tools are pretty user friendly as far as it goes), then I’m sure there is someone you can ask to teach you how to use a tool. All you have to do is ask for help, but often that is a mind blowing concept.

Social media and scheduling tools like Google Calendar, Skype invites, Slack, and even just email are great tools, but only if people actually use them. How might we get more people to update their availability status to teams in a timely manner?

Welcoming Summer Adventures

I’m a senior!?!? I still am processing and I don’t think it’s officially hit me yet, but I’m certain that junior year is over and now for the excitement of summer!

It’s funny because although I’ve had my last day of school, I will still be in the building for meetings and projects that don’t stop just because a final bell rang. Plus, I’m only done because I’m lucky enough to be exempting all of my final exams since I had all As and not too many absences. However, not everyone is in this situation, so the last day feels a tad anti climatic because not everyone really finishes school at the same time.

The part about today that made it really feel like the end of a year was saying good bye to teachers that are not returning to MPVS, and having mini parties in some classes. I’m one of those abnormal children who enjoys school most of the time, so I’m sad to an extent that it’s over. I’ll miss seeing my friends everyday, and I’ve already been missing drama, and Innovation Diploma is never really over, though getting to see everyone in person won’t happen over the summer much. Plus of course I’ll miss playing Kemps and jamming to musical music in A Cappella club.

I’ve already made my list of summer goals, which includes various reading pieces, writing ideas, working on the Senior Theater Project, “before I graduate” plans to finish, working on mini interest projects, and many more. To me summer is a time where I truly get to take control of my learning (plus sleep more), so I’m sad this year is over because it flew by and was mostly enjoyable, but I’m also super ready to welcome summer adventures!

Individuality

Being a leader is hard. I’m the founder of Kemps Khaos Club at MVPS last year, though we were an un-offical club 2 years ago as well, and each year we’ve tried to improve our student-faculty card game tournament.

This year we set up the “Kemps Kouncil”  to help deal and organize all game times. However, trying to organize the Kouncil to make sure they organize the games is a whole other challenge. It’s been challenging mainly because usually I’m that kind of leader who, when something isn’t being done, I just do it myself to make sure it’s done. However, with Kemps, I’ve really been trying to let my team mates take that responsibility and just give them reminders to make sure it gets done. The hard part is when I get questions from teachers about when they are going to play their next game and all I can say is, “I don’t know, your dealer should be sending you an email soon…”

A lot of times when I’m on a team I end up in a leadership role. It’s just my personality and nature I guess, even in a letter I have from my preschool teachers it says, “When playing in a group setting, Anya prefers to be the leader but will allow other children to take over that role as well.”

In fact a lot of that letter is a surprisingly accurate description of how I still am today, which seems so weird considering I was 3 at the time this was written. I wonder how old we are when our fundamental personality traits start showing. How much do we really change over time? What traits start showing themselves earlier than others? What personality traits are more likely to change over time versus staying consistent through out a person’s life? What shapes our personality?

I feel like in high school one of the most common faced problems is someone feeling the need to be like someone else, rather than feeling comfortable with embracing who they are.  Everyone is an individual person with different personality traits. Some that are praised, and others which show our weaknesses, but they all make us, us. Our differences are what make us unique, special, noticed amongst the crowd.  At a wedding the bride is the one in a different dress. When trying to get someone’s attention you stand up to be spotted in the sitting crowd. In a sea of yellow flowers, it’s easy to spot the one that’s a radiant, ruby red.

For the amount of stress teenagers go through with trying to figure out “who am I?” I wonder what it would be like if schools placed more time and energy into helping students embrace their individuality. It’s a skill that will truly last a life time and be invaluable to success.

Individuality is important to me, and it’s something I see people struggle with all the time which makes me sad, frustrated, and oddly ignited. HMW help people feel comfortable being themselves? It’s a question that’s been asked by people for centuries, so why does it seem that not much has changed- I mean if the question is still being asked, clearly the problem hasn’t been solved. Why not? Are we asking the right question? Are we tackling the problem the right way? Are we communicating and working with the right people?

I feel the designer inside of me burning with questions and a sense of agency to take action in some way or form yet I simply don’t know where to start, so I’m starting with these questions. Hopefully something will come from them.

New Season, New Rules, and Newbees

I’m not a great singer, and I know this. However, I love band and being in musicals, so I would really like to improve my singing capabilities. So now, officially as of today, I’ve joined the new a cappella club at MVPS.

We were talking about what to name ourselves and it just made me think about all of the big choices that have to be made when starting a team. Or even when continuing a team but for a new season.

We’ve been in the process of organizing Kemps Khoas club stuff for what will now be our 3rd season, and every year we have new challenges because we try to make new tweaks to better the experience for everyone. Since year one, based on feedback from players, we have more than doubled the size of our tournament, we have made more concrete rules, we have changed the system for creating teams, we’ve added some fun all play days, we’ve gotten more efficient at scheduling game times and dealers, we have an official council helping to organize and make decisions, and this year we will even have a snazzy trophy being designed that will be 3D printed for our champions.

Every year, while the game has stayed the same, the full program as you may call it, has had to change to keep up with what is and isn’t working and to take account for the newbees that join each year, many that have never even heard of Kemps before.

After today, I realized how stinking similar this process is going to be (but on a much large scale) for ID as we start to experience it for multiple years now. We made it through a year, and it was great, but that doesn’t mean we can’t improve upon the system. In fact, it means we have to change the system because now, like in Kemps, we have newbees, many that are still trying to figure out how they fit into ID.

One change we made for Kemps this year is that we are requiring people who signed up at the club fair to come to at least one of our 3 info meetings in September to show that they really are dedicated and want to play. At these sessions we informed the returning people on the changes we’ve made for this year, and for the newbees we do the same, but we also have to teach them how to even play at all.

After our first info session which was held yesterday, I realized that it probably wasn’t super efficient with having both newbees and oldies there at the same time because the way I needed to present the information was very different. I tried to explain to the oldies first so that way they could move on to other work if they didn’t want to stick around to play practice games. The newbees were still in the area when I was explaining the changes to the oldies, but to them it all sounded like jargon at that point because at that point they didn’t know the basics of how to play so they didn’t have the content for the ideas to latch onto (so I assume based on observations at least). Therefore, in the end I actually had to repeat myself a little so that the newbees could better understand after they were given more content.

I notice the fail up opportunities in this system, but I also recognize that we’ve still made an improvement even from last year. Last year, if you didn’t know how to play then you had to taken upon yourself to reach out to someone that did know in order to learn and rules and regulations were emailed to everyone in a google doc, which most people didn’t really read… Therefore, a lot of people played their first ever match during the tournament, and big overarching things to know about the club, were mainly spread by word of mouth we discovered. We took these observations to try and make improvements this year, but with new ideas will always come new obstacles to jump over.

And now is about when I’m realizing, ID is facing similar challenges. With year 2 we have many new ideas being experimented with due to observations and discoveries from year one. However, we also have the added ball in our jugglers hands, of having a large group of newbees that have to first learn the content of the game in order to understand the whole game process. As an oldie now to this process, I may not need to relearn the entire game, but I still need to understand the changed rules which can sometimes require a little backtracking and relearning in a new way to come to a better understanding in the end.

In ID today we what some may consider a “serious talk”. We had everyone seated down in the conference room and our mentors discussed with us how they don’t see “the light in 100% of our eyes”, meaning not everyone has been keeping up with the responsibilities we all agreed to keep up with as a member of the Innovation Diploma. So they read some passages, and showed us some video clips, all with the intent of making us think about what we want to get out of ID and about what we can do to help make sure everyone feels successful at the end of the year.

I’m going to be honest, I blanked when reflecting on my definition of success in ID for me personally. I don’t know what success will look like because I’m not even sure on what my goals are yet. I have a problem, that most everyone is well aware of at least from the Disney Cohort, where I get involved in a bunch of things, but never dedicate specific focus to do one thing really well. This makes defining goals extremely difficult for me. And I think this is why I have better success when working on a team.

For example, while Kemps club was my idea/brain baby creation, it was the motivation from my peers that really inspired me to get it started. Year one it wasn’t even a real club. I had suggested the idea at the end of 8th grade, and then the next year, while playing during lunch one day, the idea came up again. So my friends and I pulled out a computer and started making a draft of what the letter would look like that we would send to teachers, since almost none of them had ever played/heard of Kemps before. The letter amused us so much that we all agreed we should actually make it happen. That’s team decision, which almost felt like a challenge and thusly a new obligation to complete it in a way, is what motivated me to start the steps needed to make the first year tournament a thing. Then after that first success, the next year we were able to up our game with a new challenge: make it an official MVPS club. This years main challenge is to gain participation and excitement to start thinking about how to keep the club going after my grade (which includes most of the club currently) graduates high school.

I also find that when I make my challenges more public, I feel more obligated and dedicated to get them done. Even when I first started this blog, it all started due to first a challenge, and then my first post where I shared my challenge, and once that happened I felt obligated to my followers and also to myself to prove I could complete the challenge. I can often feel the moment when I take ownership of a project/venture, because in that moment is when I feel energized to see it all the way through. It’s the moment of no going back. To reach that point though, there is often a lot of struggle and doubt where it’s the support of others and reminder of a goal that keeps pushing me forward.

I remember going through these moments even with mine and Kat’s AP Lang Collab-Course. At first the class was just an idea. I got on board more as a “why not? The opportunity seems like a good solution based on my needs, so sure I’ll go for it.” Then slowly as more people started to get interested and ask questions about the idea, and we really started to immerse ourselves into the venture, we got to the point where we now feel immensely proud about how it’s even a thing at all! Since we are only a team of 2, rather than most of our support coming from a team mate, we really had to put a lot of trust in our mentors and I think that’s what made us successful in the end.

At fuse15 during my MoVe Talk I talked about how important the role of a mentor is to thinking like a designer. I believe so strongly in this! All of the time I look back on my high school experience and just think, “I don’t know how I would have gotten through that without such awesome mentors.” Kat and I based our course off of The Hero’s Journey, and an early step on that journey is specifically dedicated to “meeting the mentor” because every great hero has a mentor. Just like Mr. Miagi, mentor’s often use some wacky plan or analogy, like constantly referencing The Lion King when talking about school struggles, or having students do improv for a whole week of class, or going on tangents in other languages and subjects, or letting students dress up in wacky costumes to intensely debate a case for an ancient and dead warrior, or starting off a new semester by playing cranium. To some, these methods may seem insane and not make much sense, but if you trust the mentor and wait out the process with full dedication, eventually the method to the madness becomes clear and it turns out that all of these crazy methods have immensely helped my learning.

Games, systems, and new organizations, they can all be tricky to develop at first, and future years always bring new obstacles with every new opportunity. However, with support, commitment, and trust, success can be found.

VelociRAG Bonding

I feel like I’ve been making such better bonds with people in the last few days. Which would make sense since a day in TIP time equals a week of normal school, so in theory we are about at second semester now at which point people start to have some great stories.

My class today played Kemps during the break which I always find to be a great way to bring people together since there is partner work and tons of laughter. I also played Hearts again with people during break which was nice.

Tonight was also my Rag Night as we call it, so instead of going to an evening activity, our Rag group all decided on something special we wanted to do as a group. We decided to go see Jurassic World, and coincidentally my TA and instructor ended up coming with us because we needed drivers which was kind of neat.

To be honest I wasn’t in love with the movie itself, but our entire Rag had a fantastic time!!!!!! We were about 20 minutes late, so even with previews we missed the beginning and then couldn’t all sit together because we weren’t really that organized while coming into a movie late. I sat next to one other girl in my Rag and we had some hilarious commentary! After the movie all we could do was laugh for some reason, which was probably bad, but we were all just so happy because we had such a good time with our rag!!!

We even decided to call ourselves the “velociRAG” because after the movie we were acting like velociraptors and were really happy about how we bonded.

It’s amazing how people can bond in the most unlikely of places. Who new you could grow so close to people by watching a movie?

Observing the Little Sparks

Today, (like pretty much every day at Nerd Camp), was fantastic!!!

Sunday’s are our only day off from class, but we still do a bunch of learning because it’s still life! We have free time until 12, then from 1-4 we do TIP Star activities (which usually are more learning activities), then 4-5 free time (like normal), then dinner, then 6-8 we watched a movie, then free time until our rag meeting and bed.

After playing flute some, I did lots of physical stuff today actually. I stretched for gymnastics practice, I tried out for the top ultimate frisbee team, and I took an African Dance class.

Ultimate frisbee cracks me up at TIP because we take it really seriously. The try outs today involved signing up, choosing which team to try out for, an inspiration/historical speech of why we play and have the Water Colors team (the top team that is captained by a 4th yearer who was given the special frisbee by last years captain and has been signed by all of the past captains), then we did some actual drills with ways to pass a frisbee and offense versus defense. So I’ll find out later this week about the team…

African dance was also really cool because I love dancing and it’s always interesting to see how different cultures dance. We learned a dance from Guinea and it was really energetic and fun!

The second activity I did today (which was actually my first TIP Star activity before African Dance) was Make a Movie. I was in an all girls group with a bunch of people I didn’t know, but we decided to make a silent, abridged version of Romeo and Juliet. It was all filmed in the library and some right out side of it, and it actually turned out surprisingly well! In fact I think it was better than most school movie projects I’ve done and it was completely filmed and edited in only and hour and a half which is way less time than any of our school projects take. We had one girl who was a wiz with iMovie on her phone and was editing as we were filming. It was actually incredible and it was one of those moments where I was amazed with what people can learn to do.

The idea of being amazed by what people can do relates so nicely with the movie I watched today. I watched The Imitation Game!!!!! I’ve seen it once before a month or so ago, but I’ve been wanting to watch it again especially since being in Spy 101 because the movie is all about stuff we’ve been talking about!!! We spent about an hour one day talking specifically about Enigma and WWII even. So this time I think I was able to follow a lot more of the story just because I had a better idea of what was happening (it switches time periods a bunch and I don’t think I caught that well the first time), and on a small scale I related to the stress and joy to code breaking.

I love the quote that they repeat through out the movie, “Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine.” It’s just so inspiring to make you want to embrace the things that make us all different.

I ended the day with more learning too. I taught some friends how to play Kemps, then when we had 5 people we switched games and I learned a new card game for me called Hearts. The game was pretty fun and it is basically the opposite of Spades in just about every way which I find funny because I learned both at TIP.

Learning doesn’t stop when class stops. We can be inspired by things all around us, and who knows if some little thing we learn could spark a new passion and goal inside of us. I wonder if people take more time to notice and observe even our little learning moments, then will these sparks become more clear.

Schools Out!

I’M DONE; I’M OFFICIALLY ON SUMMER VACATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (So I guess that means I’m officially a junior… Wow. That makes me an Upper Classman…Still processing that one because it just seems too crazy to be true.)

Ah it feels great to be able to exempt final exams because of good grades because now I get a whole extra week of summer! Today I took my first ever AP exam, and I must say I felt pretty good about it. AP World is supposedly one of the hardest AP exams, and while some of the multiple choice I didn’t quite know, I think I rocked the essays (hopefully my thought is correct)!

Because of the AP I got to leave at 11:30ish technically but I stayed to watch the finals of Kemps Khaos. A) I wanted to stay. B) I think it makes sense for the president and founder of the club to be there for the championships.

I still can’t believe it is actually the end of the year. It seems like so much has happened.

I founded Kemps Khoas as an official club. ID was founded and the Disney Cohort came together. I lead business leaders through many a design thinking challenges. I took my first AP course. I went to San Francisco. I sat back stage at Wicked. I had my biggest drama fail (#failup) as well as many successes like our biggest production that we’ve ever done. I managed to participate in all of the band concerts by working on pieces outside of school on my own. I started a Twitter account. Plus I kept of this blog for almost a full year now! (This is post 324!!!!)

I’m still trying to process that all of this happened and this is just some of it!

With summer coming up it makes me think about when I started this blog and I had no idea what to blog about. I felt so confused, but I was just going to go with it. Seems like it worked out pretty well. I’m actually really glad I had started over the summer and not during the school year because it encouraged me to take special notice of learning outside of the classroom.

As the summer starts I hope to continue this blog with how I started, by observing, learning, and reflecting without having to be in a classroom. (Well I mean Nerd Camp #DukeTIP is still kind of classroom, but the idea is still there!)

Passing the Oblique Asymptote

The last two weeks of school may very well be the most stressful weeks of the entire year. In these last 9 days I have 7 quizzes, two projects, 1 test, a research paper final draft, a MoVe talk, a Kemps tournament to finish, and more venture work.

I’m just a tad bit stressed right about now.

I don’t get it; why does the end of the year have to be so stressful? Why does it never feel like we had enough time to get everything done? Why do we get so many last assignments? It isn’t like this is the last time we will ever be learning.

I wonder how things would be different if we changed the concept of final exams. What if our “final exam” was some big transdiciplinary project where we could present on anything we wanted in any format as long as it connected to some theme we decided on?

I still remember last year when my science teacher showed me this amazing final exam he had created. It was entirely interactive and even involved a page where you would use prototyping materials to create a model of a cell. This exam required you to be creative and use concepts from across the year to apply it into actually doing something rather than just answer multiple choice problems.

I mean from what I can tell based on the limited accidental empathy work I’ve done, teachers feel obligated to use multiple choice questions because it is expected on a final exam, even in subjects like math where we never have multiple choice questions all year.

I understand that part of the reason for using multiple choice is because it makes grading easier and when there are that many tests to grade, it needs to go somewhat fast but still be even grading overall.

So what if we were to take collaborative final exams? (I’ve mentioned this before in some of my other blog posts from first semester exams, but this idea just keeps coming up.)

What if we tested collaboration skills on this final exam by making the class work as a team to complete a challenge. To be honest that may pose to be more challenging then you would think, and it would test skills that will be more important than knowing how to find the oblique asymptote on a graph in the long game. ( An oblique asymptote is a line that a graph will get infinitely close to, but it will never touch or go past this line. )

To my knowledge, I’m going to exempt all of my final exams (then again all of the assignments coming up makes me nervous about that, mostly for AP World where 6  of those quizzes will take place in to prep for the AP exam #blah), so in actuality finals themselves aren’t really stressing me out.

However, I still don’t feel like I can celebrate my year of learning because of how much work is going on in these last 9 days.

One of my teachers today said that teachers don’t try to be creative or different with their finals because they are too afraid of having to change it after it gets reviewed. I find it a little weird that you can have one team review all of the finals because when you think about it, it would seem weird for an English teacher know what a good math final looks like right? (That was just an example; I don’t even know the exact team that reviews finals I just know I’ve heard this mentioned.)

I wish a teacher would try to push over that line of what a final can be. How do we know if it would get approved until we try?

To add to my list of valuable lessons I’ve learned this year: changes take risk taking and the willingness to fail up. HMW end the year on a meaningful note instead of a stressful one? I can’t wait to see that experimented with; I can’t wait for us to cross the oblique asymptote line.

Curiosity and Passion Drive Learning

A few days ago I was asked to write a piece for the MVPS magazine about how curiosity and passion drive learning. This topic really resonated with me and I gladly accepted the offer!

It makes me incredibly happy to know that people are actually wanting to read my pieces of writing especially because English has always been a subject I’ve struggled with in school. One of my biggest take aways from this year unquestionably is that it doesn’t take getting an English major to make a piece of writing, it just takes a good story and someone willing to take the time to write it down.

This is what I wrote (this is before being looked at by the head editor by the way so it may be tweaked some before the final copy):

Learning doesn’t start with school. Learning doesn’t end with school. Learning is a process of life. I may not be the oldest and/or wisest person, but over the years I’ve discovered a secret: learning happens most when you are curious and passionate about a topic. The combination of curiosity and passion has the ability to spark a fire in your body that is always craving more. To know more, to do more, to learn more.

A personal pet peeve of mine is when people do things just because they think it will look good to other people, not because they are actually curious and interested themselves. Currently I’m an actress with the MVPAllStars, a varsity soccer player as well as a rec soccer player out of school, an acrobat, a gymnastics coach, president of Kemps Khaos club, a flutist, a Girl Scout, a Duke TIP participant, a National Honors Society member, a straight A student, and a Disney Cohort member in the Innovation Diploma. With all of these different things going on, you can imagine that I have to be very strategic with my time management, so I want to do things that I really enjoy in order to enhance my learning the most. This is important to me because life is about stories, and your story is made up of the things you love.

As a student that values sharing stories, building a team, and exploring possibilities with space, I have discovered an overarching goal of mine. My goal is to help establish a culture that resembles those of innovative businesses; thus creating a community that is constantly sharing ideas and taking action to make impacts on peoples’ lives. What really helped me establish this goal and these passions of mine has been the influence of all of my cohort members in Mount Vernon’s Innovation Diploma (ID). This year marked the inaugural year for the one of a kind Innovation Diploma. Those of us that participate in this program are a part of a cohort that will work together throughout our high school years learning how to improve our skills as innovators while following our passions and pursuing our goals.

Specifically, I have really enjoyed all of the work I’ve gotten to do facilitating design challenges through ID this year. At the Council on Innovation for 2014, I got to help facilitate twenty experts and visionaries in entrepreneurship, education, business, and community leadership through a design thinking challenge around “How might we enhance our creative impact?” alongside a few amazing teachers and mentors of mine. This was one of many opportunities I have had this year to develop my skills as a leader of design, and the experiences have also helped me in my classroom education with leading teams on projects like a mock trial for Genghis Khan.

I’m currently on a team that is in the process of redesigning the ID studio into a more flexible and creative environment in order to complement and further the work that we do. I learned from an interior designer how to use a tool called Sketchup to make a virtual model of a room– a skill I had started to learn over the summer while at Duke TIP and now got to use again while in school! I have also gotten the opportunity to talk with lead designers at Wonder by Design who are currently working with MVPS and have worked with Stanford in the past. I even went on a trip to San Fransisco for interim  so that I could further enrich myself into the innovative world of design where I got to tour the Stanford d.School, Facebook, and IDEO to name a few of many.

It isn’t hard to be curious, just start with questions and see where you go. Often times a simple little question like, “How are design conferences organized?” can lead you down a great path where you may just find a passion. If you have a question, then you are destine to at least learn the answer to that question, and likely you will learn so much more, which is what makes questions so amazing! As one of my favorite innovators, Walt Disney, once said, “When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.”

Character, Service and Leadership

Well we officially do not have school tomorrow, and I think I’m one of the only people truly upset about not having school tomorrow. I was suppose to have a math competition, our iStudio pitch to Dr. Jacobson, and opening night for Welcome to Nightvale. (We already had to move up the time of our preview tonight, so quite a few people missed the show, and now we won’t get our opening tomorrow and don’t know what the new plan is exactly.)

However, I’m excited to have the extra time to sleep and get work done.

Today, since we didn’t need to be concerned with homework for tomorrow, some of my friends and I had a google hangout and played WarLight and Wiki Wars which was really fun. High school just continues to get more and more stressful, so it’s nice to get a moment to relax and regroup every now and then.

Another exciting thing that happened today was I got accepted into the National Honors Society! This was really competitive this year especially, because as I’ve mentioned, my grade is competitive. There were something like 44 current juniors and sophomores that were eligible for this society, but there were only 13 spots available.

I feel pretty awesome and honored to be one of the 13 accepted. It is one thing to make good grades.  It is another thing when people recognize you for your character, service and leadership.

I also want to acknowledge how much I feel like ID has supported my leadership side of this especially. I’d consider myself to have been a leader before ID even was a thought, but when writing the application on the leadership portion, so many thoughts came to mind that were opportunities from being in the ID cohort that it was hard to pick specifics to talk about.

This was actually my specific writing portion for the leadership section (responding to: Please list your top 5 areas of leadership.)

I am very confident with describing myself as a leader. I am a part of the inaugural Innovation Diploma cohort and I find myself being in a leadership role consistently through our work on challenges.
Some of my favorite moments include being a facilitator while working with the CDC on real issues they were working on, and also being a leading facilitator for Mount Vernon’s 2014 Council on Innovation. I shall be a facilitator once again this summer at FUSE15, helping to lead educators from around the nation in design thinking challenges.
I am have also, currently the president of Kemps Khaos club which I founded this year as an official club, but I also organized this tournament last year in which students are partnered with faculty members to try and win an awesome card game tournament. We currently have over 50 members in this club consisting of students, teachers, and faculty members from all divisions of the high school.
I’m also a dedicated actress, soccer player, and gymnast, and now that I’m finally 16 I am finally old enough to be an official USA Gymnastics coach for competitions. I have taken all of the courses I needed to, and have already coached at multiple gymnastics competitions this winter. I specifically have helped a lot with some of the younger girls by creating their floor music, choreographing their routines, and teaching them to the gymnasts, so it is really inspiring to now get to be on the floor with them during competition.

I’m really happy about being accepted and can’t wait to start getting involved. (I’m also nervous for the weather messing a bunch with our schedule for the rest of this week, especially with us leaving for San Francisco Saturday.)

(If you are just curious, this was the rest of my application):

Service:

I have been a Girl Scout since 3rd grade and have done many service activities through my troop which is still together even though we all go to different schools now. Some highlights from Girl Scouts for me personally was when we got our Bronze Award by volunteering at Noah’s Ark (a refugee for children and animals) by cleaning up the site and creating donation boxes to bring to the organization. We also have worked with cancer awareness opportunities many times and have helped set up for the breast cancer awareness run and I am going to be volunteering during the annual Pink Affair later this year.
I have also served many honors over the holidays in the past. One year I helped donate, rap, and deliver Christmas presents to local areas around Atlanta with a group of about 20 others (this wasn’t through any big organization). I have also served around Thanksgiving time doing similar activities, but with food donations run through Chamblee Methodist Church.
I also serve at MVPS frequently. This past year I spent over 20 hours working with Mr. Taylor on his one man production of “A Christmas Carol”. I ran the sound for his show at MVPS and two other off site locations as well as extra rehearsal outside of school drama times. While not officially on the Ambassador Prefect committee, I have also volunteered to help at almost all of the past Curriculum Nights and Open Houses at MVPS in the past 2 years that I’ve been a high schooler. Teachers have often asked me to help give presentations to help share the story of what MVPS is doing at school to the out side community, and I alway am happy to help whenever I can.

Character:

(I thought it would be more meaningful to get direct quotes from some of my friends, so these are all quotes from various people that I value the opinions of very highly. Some of these are from more recently, and some are actually from when I asked people this question last year in order to describe who I am as a part of my Innovation Diploma application. This comes from both students and teachers whom I consider to all be my friends. )

“A true friend who knows how to be serious and funny. Someone who puts it all on the line and give it their all 100% of the time.”

“Extremely intellectual and someone who always is wanting to learn more. Also a very hard worker and someone who is very reliable and just a good all around friend.”

“you are the dig deeper girl – analytical – creative – openminded. You are indescribable”

“I would describe you as witty, humorous, and smart.”

“Genius, nerd (in a good way, everyone is a nerd at something), cooperative, respectful, helpful, considerate, teacher, successful, determined, and creative. ”

“πnya is a very energetic, creative peer who is constantly curious about the world around her. She makes connections which she keeps, and continues to show her ability to network and empathize with others. As a friend, she is always encouraging those around her and building off of others ideas. She is always willing to take on new challenges with great enthusiasm. πnya is an awesome person and an amazing friend!”

“I would say you’re helpful, always up for a challenge, want to see others succeed, and are responsible. ”

Why do you seek membership into the National Honors Society at Mount Vernon?

I want to be a member of the National Honors Society so that I can be a part of a community that honors service and leadership. I am constantly looking for ways to surround myself with people that share common values of mine, and I hope that membership in the NHS at Mount Vernon will help me associate myself with the right people to help me move further on my path in this world.

What should we know about you that is not covered on this application?

Over the summer I have also been participating in the Duke TIP program for the past 3 summers, and will be attending this coming summer as well to further my leadership skills while working with students from across the nation on interesting topics that you would not typically learn about while at school.
I will also hopefully be attending the National Student Leadership Conference this summer as an engineering student at Yale University.