Most Difficult Assignment

I think that the most difficult assignment I’ve has to work on has been an assignment that I didn’t even have to do for a grade, but as a project requirement for my International Baccalaureate program back in high school. For this program, every student is required to complete a CAS project, which is meant to enhance not only the learning experience of the individual student, but also to contribute to their community at large and ultimately result in a perspective shift.

For my CAS project, I collaborated with two other girls in my class to put on an educational showing of the documentary The Hunting Ground to promote awareness for sexual assault on college campuses. In order to do this, we collaborated with the educational coordinators at a local nonprofit theater called Film Streams that show different movies in order to advance some theme. Since our project aligned with their mission statement and their previous educational showings, they agreed to host the event for us while we got students to com and organized an educational panel.

This project doesn’t sound conventionally difficult in an academic sense, but it was extremely difficult organizing a large-scale event and finding educational panelists to speak after the documentary was done playing. We were a team of three high school juniors at the time and thinking about completing the project at the time had been extremely daunting and exhausting. Because we were responsible for reaching out to schools to get students to come, we had to email several teachers from not only our high school but several others all around the city. It was difficult when at first we got declined from multiple schools or just never received a reply from them.

Finding panelists was also a rather difficult task. We originally tried to contact Planned Parenthood and the local Women’s Center to try to get a representative to come speak, but they were either too busy or could not make the date of the showing. When we were able to get panelists from Creighton University and University of Nebraska at Omaha, they still weren’t able to confirm their availability completely until three or four days before the event.

In the end, we ended up getting almost two hundred students to come out and see this documentary, listen to the four educational panelists we contacted for a discussion after the documentary, and even typed out a pamphlet of facts and resources to hand out to every student.

I think overall, this project was made difficult by errors in communication and just a general lack of knowledge. Not only did I and my partners in this project have difficulty finding times to get together to complete it, but none of us had ever done something like this on a large scale so we didn’t know how to go about contacting various people and how to persuade them to participate in this event. However, we managed to complete this project extremely successfully. From doing to project, I learned how to better communicate with others when working with them. I also learned a lot about how to reach out to various organizations in different settings. However, I think the most important thing that I learned is that you need to have a drive and passion for what you’re doing, or else you aren’t going to enjoy it. This project allowed me to expand my communication skills as well as my level of professionalism, and I overall really enjoyed working on a cause that I felt very passionately about.