Month: April 2026

This semester has taught me a lot about not only myself, but my place in a group setting as well. One of the major lessons that I have learned is that the world does not stop moving just because you are going through complications in your personal life. There have been several difficulties in my own life that I have had to endure throughout 2026, but despite those trials, I have had to teach myself how to keep up with school and work at the same time. It has not been easy, but I believe that throughout this process, I have also started learning another valuable lesson, that hard work will always outweigh raw talent. High school was a breeze for me, so I never had to put in much effort, and carrying that same mindset into college was not a smart decision. I do not have the true level of responsibility that I wish I had, and I know that I need to work on that. I need to be able to push myself outside of my comfort zone in order to accomplish all of my goals. 

CODES as a whole has been a major challenge on my collaboration skills. I have never been good at working in a group of people at any point in my educational career. This was a major challenge for me in college as well. I recognize now that it is a skill that I will need to be able to perfect if I want to get anywhere in my career field. I will need to be able to collaborate with others for the rest of my life, so it is a skill that I am attempting to work on that ability for next semester. However, I do believe that my ability to work with my classmates has improved towards the end of the semester. As long as I know my individual part in a project, I can get my work done on time. Overall, I have learned a lot through CODES, and I am truly grateful for my experience within this program. Now I have a lot of new insight on things that I need to change in order to be successful in my future. 

Meetings with both my research team and my community partner will determine the way my research project is presented in the future. With my research team specifically, my individual research project will have to line up with the overall group project. We all have the same goal of finding ways to involve young adults in water conservation efforts, but we are going about it in different ways. Some of us are organizing events, some are creating podcasts, and some are even interacting directly with students at SIUE. The idea is that all our individual projects can be brought together to support one main initiative, but doing so is going to take compromise. We must develop a few core themes to center around in order to make sure that our ideas do not contradict one another. In the end, our projects may not look like how we imagined them to be a year ago, but they will be able to come together to form an even greater group project. 

Interactions with my community partner are also going to have a huge impact on my project. Last semester, I drafted my product, which consisted of two separate pieces. Now, I want to ensure that my product lines up with the right information that Heartlands Conservancy wants to obtain and/or needs to portray. I plan to send my early drafts to Anna in order to get feedback on my overall product. Afterwards, I will implement any change that she believes is necessary. Right now, I have no idea what she might ask me to change about my products. These changes could be as simple as rewording a few sentences, or they could involve me adding or removing entire pieces of data from the product itself. So, my entire project could potentially be altered by the feedback given by my community partner.