Overall, I had a good time this semester doing the on-site work along with my teammates. It was beneficial to me as a student as well as a person overall. It took a lot of developing patience and learning how to identify when a situation is going in the wrong direction. I’m no stranger to working with other people, but I can’t say I’ve done something like this for as long as we did. I learnt that it takes a lot more compromises than I prefer in order to keep the peace when working in a large group of people. I also learnt that, while it can be annoying, sometimes you’re going to be forced to pick up people’s slack when they don’t show up or don’t follow through on plans entirely.
In terms of what I learnt about myself: I learnt that I have a lot more patience than I thought I did especially when I’m pushed to my limit. At times where I thought I’d grow impatient, I surprised myself and acted responsibly and maturely. I also learnt that group dynamics can change week to week and make activities a little bit harder.
One key takeaway from the process of data collection is that there needs to be more encouragement of going to college within black communities; there are too many young adults that don’t see any benefit of college at all, and that’s a real problem. On top of that, we learnt that there are way too many young black boys that think the only future is being an athlete in comparison to their female counterparts. A lot of the girls we talked to already had some ideas of what they wanted to do, but most of the boys just said they liked sports and didn’t have any ideas.