Leena: 20Time Final Post (Finally)

     I am really happy with this final product, but it really drained a lot of my hours in terms of free time. I had come into Journalism to finish the advertisement 4 times, each a minimum of 2 hours each. However, in the end, it was finished, and is going to be appearing this Friday on page 3 in The Saratoga Falcon. Shameless insert right there. I don't have a final version on my personal laptop, but maybe I will add it in later. The final product has two typos and one awkward phrase, but otherwise I am content. The TED talk was also WAY longer than we expected, about a minute longer than we had practiced for it to be.
     The TED talk was as good as could have made it, despite the fact I forgot to dress nicely. I couldn't sit through the entire talk again and rewatch because I have memorized the entire thing, but I hope we were as impactful as we wanted. Though, in the few minutes I did listen, I realize that Lina changed some of the slides, which I did not know about before because I wasn't looking. The audience seems engaged, so that is a pro. This talk has shown me that I need better luck. This is because we were chosen last and the only available openings were on Monday. I felt like a chicken without my head because I had an English project due Friday, so we had to meet and cram it all onto the weekend, which was unavoidable and not fun. All in all, though, I am glad we finished it early on in the week because it would have been worse to prepare during the week.

Reflection

   So: imagine. January and I had no idea what I was getting into. Little did I know that the following Mondays would unleash an onslaught of complications and difficulties, giving us a result I could little fathom at the beginning. Seriously, though, I wish I did ponder this option at the very beginning to avoid all this headache.
   Remember the Elevator Pitch at the very beginning? My partner and I went on to develop a plan: to buy out an advertisement on either Google Ad or at the mall, by fundraising with PMT to demote plastic water bottle use. As the weeks roll by, we decide to change things, small things, like that PMT is too expensive, so we will do KrispyKreme. Or that the mall was a bad idea because we had called and they gave us the wrong contact email. But then comes the complications: money. Of course, whether you have too much or too little it is always a problem. Fundraising by a student not on behalf of a club is unheard of, so we had to jump so many rules and hurdles just to fundraise. Looking back on that, there was a lot of wasted time. We should have just had a meeting with Mr. Orre and Mrs. Marshburn at the same time because there was a lot of back and forth between the two in order to get permission. That was the real challenge here. And after ALL of that, we realized that we couldn't give out billing information. So: the money that we fundraised HAD to go into ASB office account, but we could not use that account online!
   I had a eureka moment a few days following that little devilish piece of information: How about the newspaper? They do ads. Their account is within the school. It was a huge compromise because we would not get the coverage that we wanted, but now we are designing the ad and it will run on May 25. Yay!
   Honestly, I learned to be persistent and never give up. After learning that students  could not fundraise, we could have given up hope, but we did not, and that shined through in the end. Speaking of the end, if I had to do this in the beginning, I would have again had that meeting and also go straight to the newspaper option. I want to try to continue to spread awareness of this issue, especially with this new advertisement that we have been spending so much time on making.

PONDERING QUESTIONS

• How will you begin your story?

Probably with the issue and the facts. That was our motivation in the project, so sharing our research should help them see our point of view and purpose.

• What could you add to enhance your story or make it more interesting?

Instead of a slideshow, I am thinking about a sequence of pictures to encapture the audiences attention, much like B-roll in a documentary

• How will you conclude your story?

By asking for support by all to look into the newspaper and read the infographic.

No Money, No Honey

In the past two weeks, my partner and I have learned a lot about our topic actually since we've decided to change it. Our new topic isn't that drastically different but instead of overall focusing on plastic water bottles harming our environment, we've decided to focus more specifically into plastic in general harming life in the ocean. We're starting to look into facts regarding that and we've been seeing information that we've never really seen before. My partner and I haven't really learned anything about ourselves other than maybe that I'm (Lina Kim) more impatient than Leena Elzeiny. So far we have had quite a few number of setbacks. First of all, we couldn't get the days we wanted to fundraise due to them already being occupied. We decided then to just choose the second best days that were free. Another one of our setback is how when we did fundraise, the donuts came later than expected, which caused me to become very impatient, irritated, and stressed since I was afraid that all the donuts we had already paid for would go to waste and we wouldn't be reimbursed, but Leena Elzeiny came up with the plan to just sell as much as we could that day, which was only 2 dozen since most had already left when the donuts finally arrived, and to sell the rest the next day during the early morning. We successfully sold all the donuts. Our next steps in our process is to keep on looking for more information on our new topic, start desigining the advertisement, finish setting up the bank account we're storing the money in, and to keep fundraising. Leena Elzeiny and I, Lina Kim, can apply our new knowledge of  how much plastic harms the ocean life to real life by by spreading awareness about it through talking to friends, family, etc.

There is Power in the Movement

     This last week was a lot of progress.
     We hit many walls, but really kept powering through. **WARNING. The following is a really long narrative.** First, there was an issue of students fundraising for their own cause without being a club. So, I spoke with Mrs. Marshburn before school, and she said that the issue was not that we weren't a club, but we did not have an account in the Activities Office. We need the account because we can't leave the campus with the money. Anyway, we were going to need an email from Mr. Orre to validate our cause, and an account, from either one of the clubs Mr. Orre supervises or a friend's club. We went to Mr. Orre to ask him to write the email, and he ended up talking to Mrs. Marshburn. We also talked to him about using their funds, and he said to talk to the club president, Alexandria Tso. We looked up her schedule in the Journalism binder, but did not think to look up her face. This brings me of things we still need to do with these new breakthroughs. We need to contact either Alexandria or a connection as the leader of the club. We need to go into the Activities Office to plan a date for the fundraiser. We need to scout the place we want to put the advertisement, which we started to do today.
       I think we have learned to be persistent. We thought planning a fundraiser would not take this long, especially because we planned the logistics weeks ago. We have been communicating with multiple authorities to get the information we need, but there was no other way to do. We have learned that sometimes things will only follow through with lots of work and effort, not just with skill.

The Struggle of Saving the Environment

For our topic, we, Lina Kim and Leena Elzeiny, haven't learned much about our topic except for the information we had collected, that was mentioned in the first blog, due to us spending all of our time trying to reach out to people in order to reach our goal of fundraising and advertising. We've learned that we work together well because when one of us gets tiresome and drained of motivation because of a setback, the other one always helps and make sure that everything is going to go on track. So far in our 20 Time project, we've already encountered more than one setback. The first one being the fact that we can't seem to reach Mrs.Marshburn to talk about if and how we can fundraise on top of the stairs in the quad due to her not emailing us back, though it's already been two weeks since we've sent her our email. We're planning on handling this situation by instead tracking her down at school so that we can talk to her face to face. Another setback is how our prediction of the cost of the "fundraising doughnuts", that we were planning on buying from Kirspy Kreme and selling, was way off and it's actually much more expensive then we thought it would be: the enterprise only allowing us to purchase those kind if we buy about I believe it's 25 dozen boxes at a time. To handle this situation, we'll just be purchasing the normal doughnuts, without the fundraising doughnuts benefits. In our process, our next steps are to track Mrs.Marshburn down and discuss with her our plan immediately and searching for places we could possibly place our advertisement in, along with it's cost, of course. We can apply what we have learned about how hard it is to communicate to people by making sure that next time the person we're trying to connect with will get our message and respond accordingly.

Uncovering the Truth about Plastic Water Bottles

     In the United States, plastic water bottles are bought more often than milk or soda. However, the casing nor the water inside is beneficial to our society. According to research online, not only is bottled water expensive and polluting our environment, there are also chemicals in bottled water that makes it not worth the switch. Naturalsociety.com suggests around 24,000 chemicals in our bottled water. These chemicals lower the pH in our bodies, causing side effects such as skin and eye irritation, irregular heartbeat, and other problems in the kidneys, heart, and digestive system in extreme conditions.
     From this research, we, Lina Kim and Leena Elzeiny, found that we needed to spread awareness about the use of water bottles. The essential question to approach this is how we're going to spread awareness. We will do this by fundraising multiple times in order to gain enough profit so that we can buy a spot on a prominent website where we can place an advertisement that'll be made by ourselves. This leaves us with three main goals: fundraise, find places we can place our advertisement on, and create our advertisement.
     Our inspiration for this project is 20% Time. This policy allows us to spend roughly 20% of our time doing a project relating to the subject, and in our case, this is every Monday in our biology class. We thought of this topic because one of us was really interested in saving the environment, and pollution is one of the leading causes for its destruction. The other one was interested in business; buying, selling, and financial stability in general. From there, we brainstormed to reach this idea, a great comprise between the two of our interests.