What do you need?

Our team project is going well and we have finished all the research necessary to complete the report, we just need to meet up and actually write it which we will do tomorrow or Wednesday. I haven’t started my resume and cover letter yet, but plan on using a resume I created last year to apply for a job and editing it with updated work experience, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. For my CWC documents, I have a whole pile of reading to do about branding and internship programs so that I can create my marketing campaign for Equality Utah’s internship program they want to create at Westminster. I will need to complete all this reading (about 100 pages) before I can start thinking through the content and design of my publications, which I expect to be very time consuming. I’m glad that I don’t have to have all the drafts done by that 9^th as I thought before, because that would be a very difficult deadline to make.

I feel like I’m pretty well prepared to complete my assignments, all I need is more time. If anything it would be helpful to have lab time at the end of classes so that we can work on it and get advice from you, because if I need help I honestly don’t have any time that I would be able to meet with you to get it. As it is I’m already having to leave class early some days to get all my work done for this class and others. I was a little frustrated that we are also expected to do the design side ourselves, but I have a design class this semester and feel like I have the skills to complete at least satisfactory designs (especially with the help of the branding guide they gave me), if I have the time to do so.

Resume quiz

I got a 67% on the resume quiz.

Job Ad

The job I chose was the Communications Intern position at Invisible Children. IC is an organization that uses creative storytelling techniques to raise awareness about and help bring an end to the longest-running war in Africa, which has been going on for 25 years. The position calls for two people who are passionate and knowledgeable about the organization to create original content and get information out to the public about IC’s efforts. The position is interesting to me because IC is an organization I am passionate about and fights for a goal that I find very honorable.

In the description for the position, they state that the ideal candidate would be a self-starter with a lot of initiative and someone who can handle a lot of writing and responsibilities for research, reporting, and strategizing. They also require candidates to be strong communicators, both written and verbally. These are qualities that I obtain and in fact enjoy in a working environment. Responsibilities include creating content daily and weekly for their blog, writing website content, emails and grant proposals, editing print and web copy, and creating a strategy for a communications campaign for IC – all of which I have experience in.

I have been following this company for four years now and know a lot about their history, programs, mission, and ethos. At any given time, they have many projects running aiming to end the reign of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Africa, protect the people in local African communities, rehabilitate returned child soldiers, and educate the rest of the world about the atrocities perpetuated by the war. Humanitarian aid and social justice are two issues I am very passionate about and want to work with in the future, making IC a perfect place to intern to gain experience for my future. 

Finding Your Voice

I am in love with people, and think that human connection is the basis for our entire lives. I don’t value possessions, I value people and the experiences we have with them. I have a soft spot for genuineness and adventurousness in people. The people whose lives are so adventurous they seem fictional, the people who inspire the stories that hundreds and thousands of books have been written about – those are the people who make me feel alive, who make me laugh and cry and open my heart to them, and ultimately the kind of person who I hope to be.

Despite the fact that people enthrall me, I have a hard time communicating my feelings and expressing my love and appreciation for those around me. If I had to choose something that I repeatedly tell those I love, it wouldn’t be any sort of heartfelt appreciation for them or telling them I love them. I frequently use phrases like “you’re crazy” or “you’re great,” but one of the things I tell my family frequently is that they can’t take me too seriously. Ever.

As a recovering insomniac, it doesn’t take a lot to keep me up at night. Late-night discussions with my long-distance friends fill the hours when sleep escapes me, and the afterthoughts related to those discussions haunt my mind throughout my waking hours. Questions about the meaning of life, the inevitability and beauty of the death, the insignificance and indecency of the human species, and the ability of man to be unkind to another man are frequent, but are only a few in a sea of thoughts that keep me awake daily. A soothing song, whether from my stereo or in the voice of my friends, helps me fall asleep during these tumultuous times: songs of hope and love and freedom and questioning, always questioning.

I don’t know anything to be true. I think of life and everything in it as constantly fluctuating, and one thing we think might be true now won’t necessarily be in the future. I have many things I believe in, and many causes I would die for, but do I think they are true? I think they are true for me, but are they true universally? Perhaps not. Do I consider things that go against my “personal truths,” for lack of a better word, to be evil? Once again, not necessarily. I think there isn’t a lot of true evil in the world. There are things that have evil qualities, but little or nothing is completely, in its entirety, one hundred percent evil.

In others, I respect a certain sense of self-awareness and at the same time the ability to lose themselves to the moment. I respect a good sense of humor and the ability to take a joke without getting offended by it. People need to take themselves and those around them less seriously. People need to be more adventurous and open to new things; the unknown absolutely excites my curiosity and urges me to delve into its depths, to lose myself to an adventure and find myself more in the process.

If I were the ruler of the world, I would find a way to lessen the suffering of the millions of people around the world living through poverty, hunger, and disease. I would promote changes that would promote equality — on of the few things I believe in wholeheartedly and believe in as a personal truth, that everyone deserves equal rights — and better the lives of people around the world. Before I die, I hope to make a difference in as many people’s lives as possible — to allow them to grow as people and make changes for the better, no matter what kind of personal sacrifice it takes to get there.

Status Report #1

What did you, personally, accomplish on you team project this week?
This week I edited the entire Topic Proposal for the team and got it turned in for the group.

What are you planning to accomplish next week?
Next week I am hoping to coordinate the research team to get the research done and coordinate a group meeting that we are ALL able to attend in which we can discuss the research and plan on times that would work for the interview team to administer the surveys to Westminster students. I also hope to create a final copy of the survey questions we will be asking and run the questions by my team, because they haven’t seen then since I created them for the topic proposal final copy.

What challenges are you facing individually and as a team?
As a team we have some coordination issues and haven’t yet been able to find a time that works for everyone to meet for our group work. We will need to find a better system for this.

How can I help?
I think we have it handled at this point, and hopefully the rest of my team will realize how important it is and be more willing to come to the group meetings. If it continues to be a problem we will obviously need to work something out.

Team Proposal Reflection

Overall I would say that my group was moderately successful. While we did complete the project to a satisfactory level, there were a lot of things that could have been improved on and that could have gone better. One of the greatest challenges we faced as a group was trying to find time that would work for all of us to meet: as five people with extremely hectic schedules, there wasn’t a single time when we were all able to meet as a group in its entirety. We tried to overcome this by setting dates ahead of time to meet so people could get the time free as necessary and by choosing times that worked for the greatest number of people. This was sometimes successful, but other times some members of the group would forget that we had a meeting or would get tied up in something and would not show up to the meeting. In one particular case, we had scheduled to meet Sunday at 6 p.m. and only two of the five members of the group showed up and we weren’t able to get anything done because we didn’t have the materials we needed to complete the assignment.

I contributed a lot to the project and was able to attend every meeting. I made it a priority to make free time to attend the meetings and contributed to the best of my ability, trying to keep the group on task and productive. During most meetings I would type while we brainstormed out loud what to say. For the final editing of the paper, we were supposed to meet on Sunday but most of the group members didn’t show up. I was busy for the rest of the week and let my group know that I wouldn’t be able to meet again at all, but could help edit it via email after they worked on it a bit and added in all the information from our peer reviews. I checked in twice throughout the week making sure that things were getting done and got the impression that they were, but Friday night an hour before the assignment was due I checked my email and had received an email saying that nothing had been done yet. I tried to get in touch with some of the members of my team but it ultimately fell on my shoulders to complete the editing, even though I didn’t have the peer review sheets nor had I even seen them. I edited the document taking into account your notes, but I think the overall quality of the assignment suffered because of our lack of coordination.

If I could do the assignment over again, I would make sure the assignments got done ahead of time and tried to find a time that worked better for everyone to meet. I would text/call/email everyone in the group as necessary to remind them about the meeting beforehand to make sure that they didn’t miss it — especially if they said they would be there and didn’t have any scheduling conflicts. I think overall as a team we worked really well together, but needed to be better about our group meetings and actually getting the work completed.

Gallup research

The reports on Gallup.com use charts and graphs sparingly to emphasize their points and reiterate percentages and facts given in the text. This gives them an easy way to communicate ideas to the readers quickly if the readers don’t have the time or patience to read through the entire article. The graphs generally aren’t text-wrapped, so they cut off the text in the middle of the article and you are forced to look at them, which may have been intentional on Gallup’s part. However, the graphs never cut off a paragraph in the middle and are instead between relevant paragraphs or sections.

In general numbers are included in the normal paragraph form. I don’t find this to be the most effective method of relating the information because there are so many numbers all at once that it gets overwhelming and I end up remembering nothing about them. For example, in one article about rate of suffering in Iran, it said:

The percentage of people suffering in Iran is in the higher range of what Gallup found worldwide in 2010, and on par with levels seen last year in Haiti (27%), Central African Republic (26%), and Cambodia (23%) and this year in Greece (25%). Additionally, 55% of Iranians are struggling, while 20% are thriving. When Gallup first measured wellbeing globally in 2005, 12% in Iran were suffering, while 64% were struggling and 24% were thriving.

In this paragraph specifically, so many numbers are presented that it is nearly impossible to remember them well. It may have been a better idea to present the information, or just to reinforce it, using a graph, because it is clearly an important point for the article to make.

They report the methods for gathering information in its own section at the end of the article. In one article about the rate of uninsured youth in America, the information was in a gray box with faded text at the end of the article. It appeared as though this was a ploy to get readers to skip the information, and possibly goes to show that they felt their own report methods were sketchy or inconsistent. However, their reporting of their methods was thorough and from what I could tell included all possible margins of error and any questions that someone may have had about their research methods.

CWC Interview

I had my interview with Alejandro Mora from Equality Utah for the Community Writing Campaign on Friday, September 23. Overall I think the interview went very well and I left the interview even more excited to start the project than I was beforehand. I called on Thursday to set up a time to talk with him and he asked for me to come into the office the following day because he was excited and wanted to get to work on the project. To prepare for the interview, I read over my questions I created for the CWC brainstorming and fine-tuned them. I also read through their website another time to familiarize myself more with the content and see if there were any other questions I wasn’t sure about.

Most of the meeting went very well, and a few things stood out that went exceptionally. First, the timing of the CWC project seemed perfect because Alejandro expressed that they had been talking about the need for a communications campaign for several months but did not have the manpower to make it possible. They had a lot of ideas for specific projects I could work on and he was very receptive to my ideas as well. Overall I think I presented myself well and the questions I asked were well-received and was well-versed enough in their work that we were able to have a very effective meeting. One thing I think could have gone better is that he asked me what things could have been improved on their website, which wasn’t something I had been looking for when I surveyed it the first time. In addition, I had never been to their office before and as such didn’t know what their dress was. I wore a dress and blazer and was a bit overdressed compared to everyone else.

I think the best questions were “What are three main points you would like to see in this communications campaign?” and “What is the process for approving each communication?” They gave me a lot of good information that was probably the most useful for how I should structure the content I create and how I have to go about getting it produced and sent out to their community contacts. The two least useful questions were “How can we unite the organizations under the Equality Utah brand?” and “How would you like to see all the issues EU tackles united in a single campaign?” because it turned out they were both irrelevant. We aren’t able to market the three EU organizations in the same communication because they are required by law to stay separate, and we created a more specific communications campaign for me to work on than just promoting their issues to the greater community.

Overall, my interview went very well. At the end he invited me to an event they were hosting this past week, which I attended and was able to talk to them a bit more about the project and become more familiar with their work. I have another appointment to meet with him and the Executive Director this Friday and we are all excited to start working on the project.