My biggest growth over the course of my junior year was a significant growth in organization skills. Organization is important because it helps make sure that everything gets done and that it gets done correctly. Junior year was by far the most labor intense year because each class assigned a lot of after school work on top of the in-class work that took up the entire period and possibly some time after that. Without organization, all of the projects that we do would end up as a giant mess.

 

My hardest classes were classes that Ms. Durkee taught. She covers a lot of content and does some very complex projects. For example, in Government class, our main project was a piece of legislation that was called Matthew’s Bill. Trying to get organized and get all of these little projects done to advocate for the bill on top of the normal government course curriculum and all of the other class work from other classes was a giant nightmare! My proficiency in organization grew as a result because this project made me keep track of twice as much work for this class than a normal class. I had to rearrange my system of keeping track of work so that I could compensate for this extra work load.

 

Another organizational challenge would be my internship. For my internship, I worked as a staff member to teach the National Youth Leadership Training (NYLT) course for Tecumseh Council (Boy Scouts of America). NYLT is basically a week long course that teaches scouts the basics of leadership and how to be an effective leader. The issue was that in order to be able to teach a course this complex, the staff members had to start planning and preparing six months ahead of time. We would meet at a church and we would spend the entire weekend at that church planning the course. (Entire= we literally slept at the church and did not leave from Friday night to Sunday morning.) Trying to balance this course with school and a job definitely tested my abilities to stay organized and keep moving forward on my work.

 

My final example would be the science manuscript project from Technical Reading and Writing class. The only reason that this project was an organizational challenge is because my partner got sick at the very beginning and would miss school for days at a time, which would result in very scattered work. My organizational skills were challenged because I had to keep track of which parts of the manuscript were finished and which weren’t since my partner was also working of parts of the manuscript at home. There were a couple times in this project where we either repeated a part or we both edited the same part, which could have been avoided if we had been more organized at the beginning. By the end of the project, we had worked out a system and had gotten not only the manuscript done but we also completed a movie on the manuscript.