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Sophomore Inspire Week

Description:

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For my inspire week I volunteered with adaptive sports up at purgatory. Adaptive sports helps people with various forms of disabilities from people who have been paralyzed, to the blind, to someone with a cognitive problem, and helps get them outside, and in this case, on the snow. As a volunteer shadow instructor, I helped to get students on and off the lift, giving encouragement, and helping ensure they are safe and have fun. I acted as a guide for a blind skier, helped to make sure someone in a ski chair was safe and acted as a human cone and guide to a beginning skier.

Check out our presentation for our week here:

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Reflection:

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My biggest takeaways from this whole thing were probably, one, life is good. A lot of these people have a hard time doing things we take for granted. Like walking, and basic logical connections we make, like "It's cold, this coat will keep me warm." Now whenever I'm having a rough go of it, I'll just think what it would be like to be one of those people and realize that I have things pretty good. It was really an eye-opening experience.

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For this part of my reflection, I tried to connect something I learned at school to my service project. However, the problem is connecting school to real life. After about 20 minutes of thinking, I'm back, with a whole lot of nothing. No skills I have learned in the classroom helped me at all in this project, not one. The only connection I could think of is the group of slightly disabled fellow students that follow me. around that, I like to affectionately call my "Nerd Herd." While this has no classroom application it did help me be a little more patient with people who have cognitive disabilities. The second part is supposed to be how things I did on inspire week connected back to school, and other than it is a school function there was no carryover.

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This next section is on how well I managed my time, and I say I'm pretty proud of this one. I was never late for my lesson, or back after free skiing to clean up or anything. A solid example would be the second day when we had a 45-minute lunch break. I ate some lunch and left to take a free run. I finished just in time to come back and help get set for the second half of our lesson. Overall, I had great time management over these 3 days.

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A little earlier in the year, we took a series of tests with YouScience. We were then given a set of results as to what a computer thinks we are good at. However, my results were totally inaccurate, and not very useful. The only accurate thing that I saw carrying over to inspire week, was that I am an introvert, and in the context of helping people, I didn't really say much, and I didn't do well with the encouragement that some students require. For example, my first day we were with a blind and cognitively disabled student that needed lots of energetic encouragement, and people telling him that he was doing a great job. I am not that kind of person. Lots of encouragement and 'atta boy's aren't really my thing, so I found myself struggling a little with this part.

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Now I'm going to end this reflection with a little advice for next year's sophomores. First, the things you do might seem stupid but just get through it until you get to the actual community service project part if it. Second, if you think there are no good options there definitely are. Just helping people out feels good, and you will probably enjoy what you do, you'd be surprised. Finally, not everyone knows what they want to do, so no matter the idealized image of people knowing what they want as a career, don't worry if you have no idea, you'll figure it out someday.

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