Blog #9: Interviews

Hi everyone, happy National College Commit Day! I can’t believe we’re so close to graduation and actually going off to college. This is the second-to-last week of Senior Project, and time is just flying by.

Last year, many of the grant winners weren’t at their Senior Awards night to receive the award, which was a little disappointing. However, this year we hope to have all grant winners there to get the award they earned! All of the grant winners will be contacted via their youth mentor before the ceremony. Hopefully, their knowing they’ve won an award will encourage them to attend their awards night.

This week, I mainly focused on my documentary, which will be my final project. So far, I’ve interviewed our FUSD Student Support Services Liaison and two MKV youth mentors who work with MKV students directly. Through these interviews, I’ve learned a lot more about the support services in place for these students, from transportation to gift cards. I also plan to interview my external advisor (and Fremont Education Foundation President) early next week. I’d love to talk more about the interviews, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the documentary! Stay tuned for my final product to watch the documentary, which will have many more insights from the interviews.

Aside from interviewing, I’ve been planning out the format of my slideshow presentation, trying to find a balance between enough information (including bumps I’ve run into throughout the process) and staying within the time limit.

We haven’t yet heard back from Fremont Social Services about whether FEF will receive the $90,000 grant, but the interview went well. We’ll be notified of their decision in early May. Fingers crossed! Our other fiscal sponsor told me that the $7,000 check for this year’s program funding will also be sent in early May.

When applying for the grant, some students put their school emails instead of their personal emails, but we’d like to keep in touch with them, both to verify their enrollment in a higher education program and just to see how they’ve been doing since graduation. Fortunately, our FUSD Student Support Services Liaison reached out to the youth mentors, who have been able to provide me with most of their personal email addresses.

That’s it for this week. Tune in next week for my final blog!