For most high school students, college is not something they would worry about till their senior year. I am the same way. Only now, during the summer of my senior year, have I started to plan for my college life. I do regret a little bit that I haven’t done this earlier for right now, it’s a bit stressful. It feels like the due date for all my scholarships and paperwork is just right around the corner. This feeling is not something I want to deal with. However, it is too late in regretting my tardiness on preparation. All I can do is get everything done as soon as I possibly can.
For Summer Scholars, one of the projects we have to do is to help a child to plan for their future career: Service Learning. The purpose of this is to let them get a head start on things and not wait till the last minute like me and many other soon to be seniors. They will be one of the few fortunate who won’t be as stress out when it’s their time to start their college preparation.
For this Service Learning, we work with one other Scholars member in completing four tasks with a child of our choice. The one rule is that the child is from a program (Scouts, Boys Town, etc) and is between the fifth and eighth grade. The kid my partner and I had was from Girls Scout, Huyen-yen, a fifth grader.
Our first task was to make a collage. We asked Huyen-yen to pick out the top three careers that she would like to be. Her choices were pediatrician, a chef, and a bakery owner only she didn’t really knew the specific names of these careers. This was when I realized that I too, didn’t knew what I specifically wanted to be till eighth grade. From there, we helped her to select pictures from magazines and the internet. We then put these pictures on a poster board and decorated it. The final product was a collage of the three career choices Huyen-yen wanted to be.
The second task involved my partner and I to make a power-point of Huyen-yen’s three career choices. In these power-points, we had information of what these careers were and the educations Huyen-yen needed to become them. The hardest part here was the researching. When I was in fifth grade, I didn’t even thought of what I wanted to be. Huyen-yen, on the other hand, is now well informed out her career choices after we presented the power point to her.
After having a better understanding of her careers, we asked her to pick out her favorite one. She chose pediatrician. We made a skeletal outline beforehand and gave it to her after she chose her number one career. With our help and following the outline, Huyen-yen wrote an essay for her pediatrician career. I think this has to be the most thoughtful paper a fifth grader would ever have to write. I was a bit surprise how much thought she even put into writing it. If it was me, the paper would just be words and would not have much meaning to me.
The final task was to make a S.M.A.R.T. plan. We had to help Huyen-yen to make schedule for her junior and high school life. It had specific events that she would try to accomplish by a certain time. The first plan was to achieve at least a B average. This would be an easy task for she is already a B/A average student. The second plan was for her to join college bound and at least three other extracurricular activities. I am sure that this can also be done with ease for she is an outgoing girl. This plan may not mean much to her right now, but I am sure it at least gave her ideas on joining clubs in school. I didn’t really joined anything during my high school year and I regret that for my transcript is pretty much blank. Hopefully, she won’t have to deal with that when she is my age.
And that concludes the Service Learning. When I first started, I wondered why we picked such a young age to work with. While working with the child, I reflected on the past and realized that there were so many things I could have done but didn’t cause I had no one to help. It’s too late for me to relive those days so I hope that Huyen-yen has learned from these experiences with us and would not have to regret anything.
