Hey guys, it is once again time for mPOLs. We’ve done a few projects so far this year and through them I’ve learnt, grown, and seen where I still need to grow. I hope by the end of this presentation I have properly conveyed where I believe my strengths and areas for improvement are. To start, let’s rip the bandaid off and talk about where I can improve.
The project that I think showcases the areas that I struggle with the best was the Monster in the Mirror project. During this project I found myself overwhelmed with the work from the project as well as university applications (specifically UBC) and my extremely full schedule. This leads to the first area that I want to improve on for the rest of the year, time management, more specifically working on/completing things before the last possible moment. A lot of my stress comes from leaving many different things until the last moment which leads to panic sessions of working late into the night to finish everything in one sitting. This usually leads to a lower quality of work than I’m capable of and is then followed by a period of time where I’ll recover during which leads to work piling up again and the cycle continuing. How I’m trying to improve is to start ordering the things I need to get done by urgency and importance and using specific days in my week that aren’t as taxing to catch up on the urgent things and get a bit of a head start on the less urgent tasks.
However, this all connects to another area that needs improvement and that is getting support from others. Last year during my tPOL I mentioned that one of the things I wanted to work on was asking for help from the people around me. I’ve improved on the front of asking for help with ideas and feedback from my parents but I still struggle with getting help when it comes to things like struggling to keep up and manage my time. One strategy that I think could be really helpful is asking either my parents, sister, or one of my friends to sit with me while I do my work since the social pressure will help keep me on task. I actually already used this for writing my book review for PGP and I think it was some of the most productive I had been in a while.
The final thing I found that I want to improve on for the rest of the year is flexing my learning by doing a bit of research on the topics we’re covering in class during my own spare time. During the Monster in the Mirror project I found that I often felt like in class discussions I had a hard time connecting to what other people had to say because my knowledge was somewhat confined to what we had learned or seen in class compared to my classmates who had gone and researched the topic at home. I think this would be a great way to extend my learning in a way that isn’t too much extra time or effort that it would get in the way of other work. One way I think would be extra effective for this would be to find either a podcast or YouTube video about the topic that I can listen to on my walk to and from school since I often listen to video essays already during those walks.
Now with the areas for improvement out of the way I’d like to focus on where I think I’ve really improved so far this year. The project for this? Girl Just wanna have (FUN)damental Rights! During this project was when I had already reflected on a lot of the areas I wanted to improve on from the previous project and I began to implement the changes I wanted to see. When writing our book’s script I did so by taking the free time I had after one of my activities and using the social pressure of my group I was super productive. In addition to that talking to my mom about the project and working with my group helped me with generating an idea for our story and figuring out how to problem solve with my group when our work wasn’t going so well. The final thing that this project really helped me work on is advocating for my ideas and pushing for my group to use them since they were well thought out and high quality. Because I knew what I was talking about and was with a smaller group of people who I’m comfortable with I was able to argue for my ideas in a way that I’m not super comfortable doing. I want to continue this trend of improvement into the rest of the school year.