We had a challenge, a mini competition so to say. But this was not about winning--it was about pushing ourselves to create the best product possible and presenting it in the nicest way with the best service we could offer. All I can say is teamwork. We only had to turn in a one-pager with the nutritional facts, price and a quick story about our product and its creation. As easy as this might seem, it was IMPOSSIBLE, because of one thing: TEAMWORK. Dividing work really is the best way to go because we all separately work on one thing and spend all our time and energy on it to achieve the best product possible. But we didn't do this for the more technical part of the challenge; we all worked on everything together and therefore the simple page we had to turn in, took us way longer to create than what it should have. I mean, looking for nutritional facts, prices, the shop and writing the story would be quick, right? Right, but only if we would have divided the work and each done a separate part. The night before the smoothie challenge, I spent almost 3 hours on Skype with Andrea trying to make the one-pager look simple and beautiful, perfecting the smoothie recipe, making a very engaging story about our product and finding the perfect location for SMOOTHIE GALAXY. By 11:30 I realized I had not yet finished annotating The Lean Startup (yes, very irresponsible of my part), and we had only accomplished 2 of the 4 things we wanted to accomplish. I very guiltily left Andrea alone to finish the one-pager and Keynote slide with the location of our smoothie stand. If we had separated all tasks into 4, we could have completed this task a lot quicker than we did. I'm still not sure who the winner of the smoothie challenge was but I learned a lesson (which I honestly thought I had already knew): when working on a team, DIVIDE AND CONQUER, not only will you be less stressed out, but you will focus your time and energy on one thing in order to achieve the best you can.
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iWeek video here!
We've been together for 19 hours out of the 35 hours of the school week and we came up with a product. A product that would be a small act of welcome to new teachers, hoping to be able to implement it in coming years. I had been told of iWeek before school started and had come up with one or two ideas, one that I thought was more useful than the other, but in the end they didn't really solve the problem we had identified. I have always done well working in groups, considering that I usually become one of the leaders, but this time it was different. I was not in my comfort zone being in front of so many people and leading them. Either way, I would have to come out of it sooner or later if I wanted to be a helpful part of this group. On Monday we had to interview teachers, the first test I would receive on coming out of my comfort zone. I once stood in front of a large group of people and tried to say that once we start to come out of our comfort zone, it gets easier each time. Mind you, I was in front of around 200 people and I did manage to mess this one sentence up royally and said quite the opposite I intended to say, but my point was understood and it was the start of me leaving this zone that was, and still is, one of my favorite places. When we first started the interviews, I was in a group of five and I was completely fine with that because it meant that there were four other people that could talk with the teachers, but we were told that it might be intimidating for the new teachers if they had five students walking up to them to talk about being new, so naturally we split into a group of two and three and I was in the group of two... with the filmer, meaning that I was going to have to speak to the new teachers. We were assigned one teacher who happened to be busy all day and I was starting to get happy about that because it meant that I was not going to have to talk to her; but we also had a problem, we couldn't go back to class with no juicy information so we went on a quest to find another teacher. We ended up in the Libru, the Early Childhood library speaking with the new librarian. When we got to the Libru, Alex approached the librarian and asked if we could interview her about her experience in Peru. She agreed and the interview started. We had 5 questions that we had come up with as a group and were supposed to ask her. At first, the interview was awkward for me because I don't really have experience doing interviews and this was supposed to feel more like a conversation than a structured interview. It was also weird because we were both getting filmed and that is something that I'm not really used to, so it was adding another level of awkwardness to the interview. At the end, the interview started to flow a little more and seemed more like a conversation but it wasn't exactly a conversation and it wasn't really what we had in mind. We finished the interview and on Wednesday we had to go back out to conduct other ones with other teachers. This time, I was less nervous than I was before but again, we couldn't find the teacher we were supposed to interview but this time I was a little frustrated about it and happily went on a quest to find other teachers. These interviews were slightly different but were also slightly easier and I realized that if I would do this more often, it would eventually become easier. Like I once tried to say before, coming out of our comfort zone is hard, but once we start doing it more often, it becomes easier and it's not so bad anymore. We all have to push ourselves, we have to grow as people and do things that challenge us no matter how hard they seem because eventually they become easy and sooner or later we find that our comfort zone has expanded and we are ready to face new challenges. I actually thought that listening to a new song each day was going to be easy, but it turns out that it is not, especially if they were supposed to be different genres. Partly because, although a very useful app at times, Shazam sometimes doesn't save the songs that were tagged, making a certain user become a little stressed out. All in all though, this challenge/task/habit was very interesting, allowing for me to explore an area that I love but don't know that well. Below is the final list of the 30 new songs. Check them out! 1. Sia - Eye of the Needle
2. Lucy Hale ft. Joe Nichols - Red Dress 3: Fitz and the Tantrums - Fools Gold 4. Birdy - All About You 5. Maroon 5 - Maps 6. Magic! - Don't Kill the Magic 7. Calvin Harris - Summer 8. The Script - Glowing 9. Tiesto ft. Icona Pop - Let's Go 10. Clean Bandit - Rather Be 11. Shakira - La Tortura 12. La Sonora Dinamita - La Suavecita 13. Nek - Laura No Esta 14. Ricchi e Poveri - Sera Porque te Amo 15. Fall Out Boy - Young Volcanoes 16. Chayenne - Un Siglo Sin Ti 17. SPOON - Do You 18. Adelberto Santiago - La Noche Mas Linda del Mundo 19. Romeo Santos - Obra Maestra 20. Vance Joy - Riptide 21. Kako and his Orchestra - Shingaling Shingaling 22. Santana and Wyclef ft. Aviccii and Alexandre Pires - Dar Um Jeito 23. Tori Amos - Crucify 24. Daughtry - Homes 25. George Thorogood - Bad to the Bone 26. Curtis Mayfield - Move on Up 27. Barcelona Gipsy Klezmer Orchestra - Djelem Djelem 28. Susana Baca - Negra Presuntuosa 29. Edwyn Collins - A Girl Like You 30. Mat Kearney - Ships in the Night I grew up with music. I started playing the cello and viola at a very young age, around 3 or 4, and although I stopped the cello after a year, I never gave up the viola. I stopped in 6th grade, took it back up in 9th grade and then again in 11th grade. Also, for as long as I can remember, I sang. I had always dreamed of being a pop star, the next Shakira or Britney Spears. This is not a dream that I stopped following because it was too hard but because I didn't feel the need to become famous in order to enjoy my singing and share it with the people that surrounded me. I remember that every year I would accompany my mother to the Christmas Cantata rehearsals every Saturday afternoon at 4 starting mid-September up until the final concert in December and this taught me to appreciate different kinds of music, from classic Christmas Carols to Peruvian folk songs to Handels Hallelujah Chorus from The Messiah.
Over the course of the year I also started to realize that I always listen to the same music over and over again and never anything that's new. That's why I decided to make my 30 day habit to listen to a new song each day, preferably each day a new genre. After doing some research, I found out that there are about 250 different music genres, a number too shocking for me to believe. These range from the most common like Classical, Jazz and Rock to the most unusual like Tex-Mex, Surf and Klezmer, genres that I had never heard of before and knew nothing about. After 28 days of this habit, I am still in awe of the number of genres that exist. Over the past 10 days I have been traveling in Mexico and thanks to my trusty app Shazam I have been able to identify almost every new song that I hear on the radio, in restaurants, movies or even walking on the streets or in little bodegas. Although I have a slight range of genres in my new playlist 30DAYS, I know that I can do better and find songs that are a lot more widespread on the genre spectrum. All it takes is sitting down in front of my laptop, opening up YouTube and searching for different genres. Now that I have left Mexico and won't be touring for the next 13 days, I know I will have more time to do this and expand my musical library as much as I can. Another source that I can use are my brothers; they both have different taste in music than me and can help me with this habit. What I know will be difficult is listening to only one new song a day and I must confess that I've heard more than one per day. I know this is not a problem, as an avid musician, I like to expand my musical library as much as I can. What will be most difficult though is choosing only one song out of all the ones that I hear each day. Complete list of music genres http://www.musicgenreslist.com/ Around a year ago, I was in the middle of making a decision: do the International Baccalaureate or take Innovation Academy. At that time, I was also making the decision of which classes to take. Over the past years, I had been really into medicine and thought that that was what I was going to study so I based my classes on what I thought I needed in order to prepare for college, pre-med and med school and not based my choices on what I really wanted and what I enjoyed the most. Because of this, I decided to take the IB simply because I felt the need to take more than the three classes that the IA allows us to take, not really because I wanted to.
The past year, I took Junior year of the IB Diploma Program and I must say that it was one of my worst years academically and emotionally. I did not feel passionate about the classes I was taking, I was not very motivated to do my best and I got to a point where I felt like I was doing work because it was assigned and not because I was learning. I also felt like I was saturated in work and did not have time to take part in any activities that I was interested in. This is when I really started to regret the decision of taking the IB and not IA. I asked the DP coordinator at my school what my options were in order to change classes to ones which would motivate me more. They basically were to either do the Certificate Program instead of the whole DP or drop out of IB altogether. At this point, I was almost sure that I was going to do the Certificate Program but not to my happiest decision because I was thinking that it was not going to be worth losing my IB Diploma because I wanted to change 1 class. If only there was a way that I could join the IA... Towards the end of the semester when I felt I couldn't be in the IB any longer, my mom talked with Mr. Topf about how much I regretted not being in the IA and low and behold he offered a place in the IA next year as an IB to IA guinea pig. This offer made Senior year look a lot brighter. I first thought it through and talked with my friends who also take IA and I decided that I would accept the offer. Over vacations, I had a meeting with Mr. Topf, as per any other IA candidate, and was officially welcomed into the IA. I am now looking forward to a more exciting and motivated Senior year instead of one full of dread and apathy. |
Author"Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light." Archives
June 2015
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