January 2nd, 2017
By Axel Hsu
With our semester long projects, or LEAD Projects, coming to an end there is a lot going on during “Project Week.” Finishing and practicing our presentations, running around to complete tasks, and meeting with our parent and community partners are all part of it. With all of the chaos surrounding “Project Week”, we sometimes forget to calm down, and take a second to realize there are a lot of people trying to help us along the way. Whether it be teachers, parent and community partners, or people from SEI – they all want us to succeed. This is very reassuring to me, and to all of my classmates. However, these adults aren’t just guiding us through “Project Week”, but through the business world.
When I told my dad, “I wish I had a job and worked just like you,” he responded with, “No you don’t; work is stressful.” I thought about this for a second and said, “but dad, school is stressful: we have homework every night with lots of tests in between.” He then intelligently answered, “but do you constantly have people relying on you to complete a task? In school, all you have to worry about is yourself and how you perform, but in business, lots of people are relying on you.” This really hit me, I never thought about it that way before. But then I thought how “Project Week” and our LEAD Projects, in general, are related to what my dad said. In all of our LEAD Projects, we all have to work together as well as rely on each other to get out there and affect the community and MarinSEL in a positive way. For example, in my LEAD Project, we sustained the MarinSEL garden as well as sold produce and educated people at our two sales. “Project Week” is almost exactly like every day in an office, except we don’t get paid. “Project Week” goes beyond out LEAD Projects, into the business world.
This chaos happening in “Project Week” may be overlooked as a bad thing. This pandemonium, stress, and anxiety is all preparing us for the real world, where we might not have as much guidance from others, but we will always have a team to rely on. “A group becomes a team when each team member is sure enough of himself and his contribution to praise the skills of the others” – Norman S. Hidle. What this quote means to me is that when a group can stick together and have a positive attitude, they can achieve anything. To conclude, “Project Week” is a great experience for all of us to learn, work together, and build new skills that will be helpful later in life.
