Skip to main content

Civic Engagement Hours (Sophomore Year)

Over the course of my sophomore year, I have been doing civic engagement to help out in my community and earn the service hours needed to graduate high school. For each year at GCE, students are asked to complete 50 hours of civic engagement. In this blog post, I will talk about each of the service opportunities I have done.


Chicago Wildlife Watch

Chicago Wildlife Watch is one of many projects on an online platform utilizing people-powered research. This platform is called Zooniverse. CWW focuses on using trail cameras placed in the Chicago area to identify animals such as squirrels, coyotes, dogs, birds, deer, and more. The website gives you an image and you can search around for any animals. If you find any you can identify it from the list of options which tells you basic information about the animals. This includes what they look like, their size, and where they can be located. These cameras are motion-triggered and are placed at more than 100 sites. Identifying these animals helps determine which species are present and assesses spatial and long-term patterns in wildlife communities. This will help the experts with their studies and know-how to conserve wildlife in the best way possible. Using the data from the cameras, the experts can get an idea of how the different species are doing and if they are in trouble. While I was participating in this, I found many animals that were sometimes alone or in groups. I also identified some humans as well. This is a pretty useful tool to help out because you can do it from your own home and I enjoyed it. Sometimes, the cameras are triggered at night which shows the photo in black and white and it can be difficult to tell animals apart from one another. From the time I have spent, working with CWW, I hope I made a good contribution to their studies. 

Chicago Wildlife Watch website when identifying animals


National Marine Manufacturers Association

My neighbor who works for Human Resources for the NMMA asked if I wanted to help her translate Interview Competencies from a manual onto an online spreadsheet. I agreed and for a period of time, I translated all 38 competencies onto the spreadsheet. This manual consists of multiple qualities an interviewee is questioned on such as people skills, decision making, collaboration, management, and more. Each of these skill sections has positive and negative themes, overuse of qualities, and 10 interview questions associated with the skill. The work wasn't very special but it helps interviewers across the company to have an online copy of the handbook if they didn't have a physical one. Because of the current pandemic, online resources are necessary for business so it is important to have that handy. The NMMA is a trade association for boats, marine engines, and accessory manufacturers. The company hopes to ensure the growth of the recreational boating industry. The company also supports the Chicago Boat Show.


My Neighbor

Another one of my service opportunities was presented by a neighbor asking if I wanted to help her move belongings from her old house to her new one. We took a couple trips back and forth and spent some time organizing belongings that had already been moved over. This included setting up the bedrooms, living room, and kitchen. It was good to help my neighbor out and see the new building they moved into which looks very nice. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building GCE's New Laser Cutter

Welcome back to my blog. This post is for my elective class Digital Fabrication. In this class, we have been looking at all things digital. More specifically 3D printers, silhouette cutters, CNC routers, and laser cutters. 3D printers are machines that can create three-dimensional objects from CAD models by layering filament to create shapes. Silhouette cutters are small electronic cutting machines that can take a file on a computer and cut it out on vinyl, acrylic, paper, and more. I have used the cutter to create stickers on vinyl. The CNC router we used in this class was a machine called the Carvey. The Carvey uses a drill bit mounted on an operating system like a 3D printer to drill into wood, foam, and other materials to create designs or molds. For each of these machines, we learned how to use their programs and later work with the machines to create things we made on the programs.  Last but definitely not least, laser cutters. A laser cutter is a machine similar to the Carve...
Post a Comment
Read more

Redesigning Chicago, One Neighborhood At A Time

Welcome back to my blog. This post is for the third Action Project of the STEAM class Urban Planning. In this third and final unit, Flow, we focused on how cities and urban areas have developed over the years. We first learned about how cities have always been centered around trade which has always relied on transportation and studied different modes of travel over the years that all contribute to urban planning. We took some time to learn about eminent domain which is something the state can use to claim private land from a private citizen for its own use if it has a strong case such as public use. We then looked at INVEST South/West, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot's community development initiative to reverse disinvestment on Chicago's South and West Sides. This initiative is trying to bring together multiple city departments, community organizations, and corporate partners and so far the city has aligned more than $1.4 billion in public and private investment. We then moved on...
Post a Comment
Read more

United States Refugees: What must they go through?

Welcome back to my blog. This post is for the workshop class, The War on X. The War on X is a new elective class at GCE this Fall term that focuses on current events that their own small battles and large levels of importance. Some topics that were up for discussion were the War on Afghanistan, the War on Immigration, and Critical Race Theory. For this first unit the majority of the class decided to talk about the War on Immigration. More specifically we focused on the United States-Mexico border and the situation there. We looked into the history of a border and eventually wall being at the border in the first place and moved on to examine more recent events from the presidency of Donald Trump. We also looked at the entry process for immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees to enter the United States. In this small Action Project we were asked to choose one of the three groups trying to enter the US and look at their entrance process further. I chose to study refugees more because the...
Post a Comment
Read more