Week 1 Blog: Senior Trip Fun + Making The Presentation

Welcome back, you Clever Charismatics!

I hope you guys have been well since the last time I saw you on week 0! Since then, a lot has happened in my life, including travelling all the way to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands with my class! The 10-day trip was some of the most fun I’ve had in my entire life, and even though we had to battle pouring rains, scorching humidity and heat, and waking up at 3 or 4 am every day, I can confidently say it was a period of time I will look back fondly on for the rest of my life. 

Although the trip was fun, it did eventually come to an end. As the trip ended, coincidentally, the senior project began! Well, to be fair, the senior project began two days before the trip ended, but the little details are irrelevant. Anyways, with my short week, it was essential that I was as productive as possible, and this week, we made some really good improvements with our project so far! 

This entire week was focused mostly on crafting the presentation. I first began by researching all previous school-based mental health assemblies that I could find, to identify exactly what topics were covered. The main ones I decided to include in the presentation were a broad overview of mental health, signs of mental health struggles that students can notice, some facts about mental health and its prevalence, and a short story. Along with these, I decided to include some other sections I felt were really important in my community, which were: myths vs facts about mental health, what is therapy, and what to do if I notice signs of mental health struggle in others or myself. I believed these three things were especially important within our Basis community because they are rarely ever talked about. Therapy as a whole can be seen as a taboo subject within our community, and many students also don’t really know what to do when they encounter someone else going through mental health problems. By stressing the importance of practicing active listening and checking in with your friends, I hope to make it easier for students to communicate with one another about mental health. 

I also decided to make the presentation as interactive as possible, in an effort to both boost the participation rate and improve retention of subjects taught through this presentation. Specifically, the myth vs. fact section and the facts about mental health section will follow a trivia-style presentation, where students actively participate in trying to guess the right answers. 

In addition to this, I also spent this past week finalizing my null hypothesis for all the things I will be testing throughout this project. In total, there are 7 unique null hypotheses I will be testing through this experiment. As I am already running out of words in this blog, I’ll explain all 7 of my null hypotheses later, when I start analyzing data, but for now, we have to look forward to logistics and planning for the experiment to actually begin! Stay tuned for most posts, you dazzling demonstrators, I’ll see you on the flip side!