Week 1

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I’m Jamia, and I think of myself as a relatively friendly person who’s extremely flexible in conversation and pretty confident in platonic relationships. Formalities out of the way, first day, even though I met and greeted one of the girls at the front door of the building, the silence in the cubical area of the department killed my confidence. Alright, that was mostly an exaggeration, but that silence really was extreme. It shut up any chances to give my introductions which I mentally repeated at least a dozen and one times on the walk from the building’s parking lot to the department on the second floor. I am getting to know the girls though, and I just love their quickness to pick up on a nickname for me since I’ve always wanted to be called Jay, but unfortunately the silence looks like it’s not going to be leaving anytime soon. Just insert ‘dread’ emoji right here, but I won’t really be saying anything else that I find bad–except the cold, I’m telling you I’m bringing a blanket next week–so as for everything else, I find it all alright. I’m curious and ready to learn new things, especially coding, so I find Treehouse alright, boring sometimes, but alright as long as Empowered continues to space out our time spent on it. For motivation purposes, I’ll just keep toying with the idea of building the website of a small business that my parents own, and for the purposes of keeping myself awake, I’ll continue to remember that I’m being paid to learn. Now, there’s this ‘best decorated cubicle’ contest next week, and I got both the beat and most cost efficient idea! I mean, I still don’t know about it being a “positive vibes only” theme, so I’ll keep working on it. Until next week.

Week 1

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Though Treehouse breaks down instructions well, the most challenging part is actually learning the information instead of just copying it. It’s easy just to write whatever the instructor writes, but when you get tested it’s obvious that you don’t know as much as you thought you did. The best way I’ve found for me is to listen to the instructor and not look at his tutorial as a way to test your capabilities, as far as memorizing and learning the different HTML elements.

Though I wasn’t there for Eric’s presentation, I still gained a lot from the guest that I was able to meet—Brit Fitzpatrick. It’s inspirational to not only see a black woman as a successful entrepreneur, but especially a black woman for Louisville. Ms. Fitzpatrick was a wonderful, articulate who honestly helped put this program into focus for me. Her journey made entrepreneurship seem, not as an impossible feat, but more as one that requires great persistence and hard work.

This week was interesting for me because I didn’t have much time to prepare for it. Coming right back from a vacation, and having already missed two days, I expected my first day at work to be tiring. And though I had to wake up early, my first day with Empowered was ultimately enjoyable and made me excited for the next day.

Week 2

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I struggled a little this week, as far as my concentration with Treehouse. My momentum is definitely not as high as it was last thursday, and I wish I could’ve worked a bit harder. I’m not sure if it’s because my sleep pattern has been off this week or if I was just really excited to start my website. Either way my progression was sort of a struggle these last few days.

Despite my struggles with Treehouse, my week was still really fun. The highlight was absolutely spending half the day decorating my cubicle, while everyone was already finished with theirs. Sometimes it feels like I’m a step behind everyone else, but regardless I’m glad I got it done. My cubicle finally feels like my own space and not just an area that was given to me. Everytime I look up and see my favorite musicians, or look to my left and see my family, my mood immediately improves.

I really enjoyed our last speaker of the week, Dr. Angelique Johnson. She was an highly accomplished, black CEO— much Ms. Fitzpatrick from last week. Her story inspired my, but her exercise when she told me to pitch my business idea motivated me. Her feedback and encouragement really made me feel like my goals are attainable. She was also really sweet in the fact she gave me a gift for participating.

Though this week wasn’t easy, it was really fun. It was Anjali ‘s last week with us, so it was nice to give her a going away party. And I’ll miss her, but I feel like I’m growing closer to the rest of the girls so my time here will still be amazing for the remaining five weeks.

Week 3

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I knew my week was going to be short since I was missing the presentations of Saturday, so I tried to get as much work done as I could. At the beginning of the week, our main focus was completing our business website, so we could really start moving toward our Empowered sites. I think everyone was pretty excited to get a break from HTML.

We also broke into groups of 3-4 members, so we could get ready for our meeting with the entrepreneurs on Saturday. Aysha, Noriana, and I were given a business that was a resource for caretakers. The objective of each group was to redesign a website for the business owner, using the psychology between color and font choice.

And to wrap up my review of the week I’d like to take about my favorite speaker, Ms. Bishop. Her story was a complete inspiration. From her being a young immigrant and having to support her family, to earning a living by being a freelance photograph. Her drive and success shows that the sky’s the limit.

Week 4

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This week has been a short one for me. Due to flight complications coming back from out of town, I unfortunately missed Monday. And then with Wednesday being Fourth of July, I am a disappointed that I didn’t have as much office time as I’d like. However, the two days that I was here was very productive.

My end goal of this week was to finish my html website, however I ran into a speed bump n can’t figure out what’s wrong with my code. Though it’s frustrating, I’m determined to fix my site and finish building it the way that I want. Besides the work side of Empowered, Alicia made some thought provoking comments about why we’re really here. The conclusion we came to is of course to get more involved in STEM, but also to form connections with each other that will hopefully last a lifetime.

Week 5

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Week five overall was a really enriching and fun week for me. When Dr. Franklin came in I learned much more than i initially expected. She spoke a lot about balancing work and personal life. Due to our age, she also talked about time management skills in college, and emphasized the importance of staying focused on your classes. It’s easy to get caught up with partying or friends, but in the long run it’s the grades that really matter. Another fun thing about week five is that we all went to Captain’s Quarters as an office. It was a great bonding day out between enjoying the food as well as the view.

Week 6

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For the documentary, our group chose the topic Youth using technology to improve their communities

 

Day 1: 7/16/18

JaMia: I chose Nori and La’Daysha as my partners for this process because i believe our interests and personalities are similar as well as compatible. Although we knew we wanted our project to be centered around technology, we we didn’t know much else. Eventually we settled the topics of young people using technology to solve issues in their community. This topic was the best choice in my opinion because technology plays such a huge part in teenagers’ lives, but few use them to their fullest potential.

Nori: My group chose the topic youth using technology to solve issues in their communities because it’s a hot topic

in today’s society. We feel like it’s very important for adults to help empower youth to know the capabilities of technology and how to helps people in communities. The first day was frustrating because we had to find research and all the sources seemed very inaccurate so that was kind of a barrier that we had to overcome but we locked down and ended up finding a lot of statistics and information.

 

La’Daysha: The first day of creating the documentary/website my group mostly focused on figuring out our topic. We choose our topic to be youth using technology to impact and solve issues in their communities. After we figured out the topic we started to find articles based on the topic. We pulled information from the articles and cited them. It was really hard to find statistics on our topic. It was mostly statics about how teens are addicted to social media, not  how youth uses technology to impact their community.

 

Day 2: 7/17/18

 

JaMia: After we had our topic down, the next thing we decided to work on was gathering data

To further educate ourselves. By looking through academic journals and instances of youth innovations, we were able to collect enough information to begin creating our cite. The goal of the website overall is not just to display the research we’ve found, but to encourage more teens to use technology’s resources to enact change.

 

Nori: We then found more data on our topic and read more things to get us a better grasp of what we were doing, then we created our website and the goal overall is to encourage adults and more teens to use more technology to help their communities more. Today I also asked Mrs. Ravichandran if I could ask her some questions about technology and youth  it was very stressful preparing questions to ask her but we did it and the interview is tomorrow.

 

La’Daysha: The next day we started to get more data and information. We started to think about people we could interview for our documentary and for more information. Nori suggested that she could interview Mrs. Ravichandran the president of GlowTouch Technologies.  We came up with six questions to ask her. The questions we came up was..

  1. How do you think technology’s impact has positively affected today’s society?
  2. What advantages do you think this generation has over previous generations in regards to access to technology & information?
  3. What  are some instances of young people who made a great impact using technology?
  4. Why do you think it’s important for young people to have on active role in STEM?
  5. How do you think adults can help youth use technology in their community in a more impactful way?
  6. How was your experience when you were young with technology?

 

Day 3: 7/18/18

 

Ja’Mia: Today, we finally started building our website! It’s exciting to see all our planning and hard work finally coming together. We plan to focus on the appearance and design of the site first, and then work on inserting the content. Seeing the progress of our project is motivating for us all.

 

Nori: Today we worked on our website and I interviewed Mrs. Ravichandran, that went very well and it also was a great experience, I was also very nervous but I got through it and my group has made a lot of positive progress and lastly we finished our layout. Also Mrs. Ravichandran said one thing yesterday in the interview and it stood out a lot to me which was “ There will be no future without S.T.E.M .” that to me is so true because most of the worlds new industries are technology based.

 

La’Daysha: Today we started on the layout on our website.  We took pictures and added them to our website. Also I went with Nori to her interview with Mrs. Ravichandran. It went very well. Mrs. Ravichandran gave us lots of valuable information that we can use on our website. She also said gave wonderfuls quotes. My favorite was “ There would be no future without stem”. Which i agree with technology is taking over the world.

 

Blog Post 4: 7/19/18

 

Nori: Today we completed our website finally. It was most definitely a struggle but we locked down and got it done, it looks good but the last thing we have to do is make our video and add it to the website that will be happening Monday. At 12:30 we met with Mrs. Ravichandran to hear about how the company began and also really good advice to help us be successful in the future. Earlier this week Ms. Bergmesiter came in and educated us a lot on past entrepreneurs who were very successful and also shared a lot of quotes with us. I’m really glad my group chose the topic we did because it’s very important to educate other people on how important technology is and also how it can be so helpful and not just for entertainment.

 

JaMia: Today was dedicated to finalizing our site, and mostly consisted of doing last minute editing to improve the content. This included making sure we cited all the sources used, as well as going more in-depth about our research topic—teens improving the community through technology. We were researching instances of different young innovators, and found four outstanding people that we really wanted to mention on our site. Their success, as well as ingenuity, made them great examples to show exactly what teens could be doing with technology if they put in the effort.

 

La’Daysha: today we finished off our site. Sadly we didn’t get to our video today. But Monday we will dedicate our whole day to filming the video. Today i wrote of the script for the video. Jamia and Nori worked on citing all of the sources used and adding the rest of the research. Jamia also worked on doing the last minute website changes.