Frustrations Throughout This Process

What were my principle frustrations? Why? How did I move forward from these? Did it change the way that I work or view Others?
Did I ever reach out to others for help to keep me moving forward? If so how did they help?

This CAS journey hasn’t been easy for me. Being in charge of two CAS projects that are very time consuming, require a lot of work, motivation and are overall relevant to our community, has been a challenge that i’ve had to learn how to overcome. This year as a junior has taught me how to be open-minded, balanced and reflective not just in school but also in my personal life. I’ve had to learn how to manage my time wisely, which i’m still working hard to improve but it’s definitely something that has helped me continue with my goals and not give up. With the yearbook, Melanie and I have faced many frustrations that has tested our determination. One of the main ones was when we couldn’t figure out how to add the portrait database into Pictavo. We spent hours and hours during spring break trying to find a solution to our problem. After we spent time getting more stressed and frustrated, we decided to reach out to someone that would be of much help. In this case we directly emailed Pictavo telling them what the challenge that we were facing was. To this they sent us many tutorials, advice and pictures of solutions to our problem. Along with them, we also communicated with Genna as she is the one that sent us the portraits. The main problem was that the database that she would sent us, didn’t have any information, just the pictures which is why Pictavo did not recognized them as files. After sending emails back and forth between all three of us, we were able to add the database in the system. But someone that we also reach out to a lot was Willa. She had been willing to help us not only with this frustrations, but with many others since the beginning. Even though she was out of the country during spring break, she was kind enough to take some time and talk to us. With the help of all three of them, we were able to overcome this challenge and add the portrait database before the third trimester started. Another frustration we have been having is the fact that many companies that agreed on buying an ad, haven’t sent it to us and we need them before June 4th. Waiting for a response from them has been very frustrating as we really need to know who will be buying one in order to have an idea of how much money we will be making from these. This personally showed me that no matter if you’re an adult or a well-known company, you can still have communication problems along with non-professional actitutes. We do know that we are young people that are started to get used to of the real world, but even we know how being professional and consistent should look like. Now for the Boston-Cepia project, the big part of this project isn’t happening until December. However, the planning and fundraiser is one of the crucial aspects of it. We are currently frustrated as we still don’t have the total amount of money necessary to take the students with. I am really proud of the campaign that we created with Indiegogo in which we were able to raise $1,500 by reaching out to people in our community and outside of our country thanks to people like Abby that are willing to help in these kind of projects. Abby for me is someone that has motivated us into working hard and trying to get that rest of the money that we need. Without her help, we would’ve never had the opportunity to share our project and goal with a lot of people around the world, specially from Boston. Even though not having all the money frustrates me, I still believe that Melanie are capable of reaching our goal before this school year ends. We will be working hard to fundraise the rest of hte money with a Bingo, with the help of other people like Miss. Amy, Abby, our community and everyone who is willing to donate to our project. This won’t be easy and we know that more frustrations are about to come, but if we have those individuals that truly help us and motivates us, then I know that we will overcome all of them in order to successfully create a Yearbook and also fundraise all the money to be able to take two students to Boston as an opportunity they might not have on their own.