I finished 6/10 of my foundation question notes. Today I'm going to work on the last few.

Proposal Edits.

Today, all I'm really working on is the edits throughout my proposal. I don't have much to change so it shouldn't be too bad of a day.

Things I still need to do:

• Outline [maybe]
• PowerPoint for final
• Some of my notes

Recently,

Recently, I turned in my rough draft of my proposal and I've done two peer edits. One with Kiera and the other with Larry.

So far..

So far this week, I've turned in my proposal but haven't done any peer editing yet because Mr. Hamilton told me to do notes or the outline. So right now I'm working on my notes and really need to finish a good bit of them up before the end of the trimester.

Proposal

In 2004, 15.5 million children between the ages of 12 and 18 contributed more than 1.3 billion hours of service. Clearly, it seems like teenagers enjoy volunteering for the most part if they’ve concluded with a result like this. But the real question is which type of volunteer opportunities benefits teenagers the most for their futures? This is the question that my project is revolving around, so hopefully after all the research and my action plan I can find an answer to it. There’s obviously a ton of different things teenagers can do to benefit themselves or others, but I’m sure there’s certain ones that benefit them more than others. Some experts believe that volunteering can benefit anyone at any point throughout their lives, “volunteering makes good business sense during all stages of the life cycle. From the student learning a new skill to the senior practicing old skills, working at a volunteer job can be practical and fulfilling” (Halpern). All volunteering requires is the thought, time, and dedication of an individual and in the end they receive the benefit of anything from a good feeling inside, to community service hours, to experience in a future career, and the benefits go on and on.

One of my main points in basing my project on volunteering is to bring more awareness to it and to the amount of people that participate in volunteering opportunities. It ends up, that for the most part people end up enjoying their opportunity and feel as if it pays off. For teenagers, volunteering can have a huge impact on their life and the choices ahead of them. Having things like volunteering/community service listed on college applications and resumes can really get someone to look at you twice. You have a higher chance of getting accepted into a good college or your personal college of choice if you have volunteer hours listed on your application, this often times impresses the person reviewing your application. A lot of colleges say that it doesn’t really matter if you don’t have a really high GPA or really high scores on college admission tests such as the SAT or ACT. College admission professionals often are impressed if individuals write an essay based on their volunteer work or extracurricular activities.

Time (months)	What To Do
November	· Finish proposal · make sure I have enough background information on my topic · make sure I have interview questions ready in case an interview would pop up
December	· Start looking for better places to volunteer · begin calling/contacting people to get more information
January-August	· Volunteer somewhere (or multiple places) · get pictures of the experience · complete an interview or two · begin more research · create student survey to see how many teenagers volunteer/how many enjoy it/benefit from it, hand it out, get results · etc.

Within the time span of the next few months there’s going to be a lot of work entailed. To finish off November and my first trimester of Graduation Project, I will need to make sure I have my interview questions fully prepared and all notes complete for my foundation questions. The last thing that will be completely necessary for November is completing this proposal fully and having a full grasp on what I’m in for with this project and the work in months to come.

For my graduation project I will need multiple different resources. Some of the technological based resources that I will need are: Microsoft Office Word, maybe Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office PowerPoint, Internet/search engines, and maybe a few other programs depending on which direction my project goes. PowerPoint is going to be a very important aspect of my final project because it’s going to have all of my final information, tables/graphs, talk about my experience volunteering, and in general just publicize my project to everyone. Supporters, interviewees, and volunteers are a few other essential resources towards my project. By ‘supporters’ I mean someone/multiple people who will maybe go and volunteer with me to make an even bigger difference at the location I decide to volunteer at – a few people who seemed to be onboard so far are my mom and Larry Hailsham. Maybe I’ll be able to find a location that would fit all of our schedules and would work out well in the end with a really positive outcome and great experience.

By the end of my project, hopefully I’ll have a really good result with good research, good evidence, statistics, and the personal benefit of volunteering. I plan on creating a survey for students (and maybe teachers) in City High to take so that I can get the results of who volunteers, if they enjoyed it/benefited from it, etc., and in the end hopefully turn that information into some type of graphical feature on my PowerPoint presentation to back up my point of teenagers benefiting from volunteer work. Also, I will have a few slides talking about my personal experience at wherever I happen to volunteer at and hopefully have pictures as well.

Workinggg.

I'm currently working on my proposal - right now, I'm on the second paragraph. I still have yet to finish up my notes on my ten websites and ten foundation questions. Hopefully I'll be able to get it all done by the end of the trimester.

Working.

All I did today was continued working on my proposal, I'm working on the second paragraph now. I plan on working on this and notes a lot this weekend so I can get a lot more done and hopefully bring my 86% B back up to an A.

Well..

Well, I had my conference today and really discovered i have A LOT of work to get done.

• Proposal rough draft/final copy
• To complete all of my notes (which I have just about none)
• Create my timeline

So, I really need to get working.

Proposal Pre-Writing Questionnaire

Today, I completed my proposal pre-writing questionnaire. So far, I think I'm pretty much on track and up to date with all my work.

Interview Guide.

Today, I completed my interview guide with an idea of who I'm going to interview and ten questions to ask them. I only had to make a few revisions, but I got them done. Hopefully, I'll fully decide soon who I'm going to be interviewing.

Books, books, books.

I found my five books, I'm not sure if they're all that great for what I'm looking for but I suppose they'll be good for now. They are all based on the same topics, so it may end up being too much of one thing and not enough of the other. Who knows.

Good Day.

I've had a really fulfilling day. I went through about 2-3 different websites and took notes on about 2-3 of my foundation questions so far.

Key Terms

I finished my list of my ten key terms and definitions. I still have yet to contact somebody to conduct an interview with.

Webliography & Contacts.

So far this week I completed my webliography and starting finding phone numbers and email adresses to contact people to interview.

I'm thinkin either someone at Children's Hospital (412-692-5325 ; chpvolunteer@chp.edu) or Pittsburgh Cares (412-471-2114 ; anew@pittsburghcares.org).

Thursday.

I'm currently working on reading through my list of websites to be able to start my webliography, I still have a few key terms I need to find to be up-to-date on that. I'll probably be working on my webliography a lot for the next few days and a good bit this weekend as well.

Progress.

Today, I finished some more key terms. I think I did about seven. I also had my weekly meeting and was able to figure out how to do my webliography correctly, and will hopefully start that sometime this week.

Did you know..?

1. Did you know that about ten million people volunteer each week?
2. Did you know that in a survey it was found that volunteering is the second favorite source of individual joy?
3. Did you know that in 2004 the estimated hourly pay for a volunteer was $17.55?
4. Did you know that Canada has the second largest voluntary sector in the world?
5. Did you know that almost half of volunteers say that helping out has improved their physical well-being?
6. Did you know that in Australia in 1995, volunteers contributed about 433.9 million hours of voluntary work?
7. Did you know that in 2004, 15.5 million children between the ages of 12 and 18 contributed more than 1.3 billion hours of service?
8. Did you know that most people in the workforce prefer to have a voluntary duty unrelated to their real professional skills?
9. Did you know that 83.9 percent of American adults volunteer?
10. Did you know that even during tough economic times the number of volunteers remained the same between 2007 and 2008, and even grew by about a million?

Last week,

I posted my most up to date essential and foundation questions.

But here are some more foundation questions:

• In what ways can teenagers help out their community?
• Do teenagers enjoy the experience of volunteering?
• In what ways do students/teenagers benefit from volunteering?
• Do organizations like having teenagers as volunteers (or would they rather have adults)?
• What are the basics to volunteering?
• In what ways do the organization teenagers volunteer for benefit?
• How can teenagers benefit the most from volunteering?
• What are some of the best ways teenagers have volunteered and helped out a good bit throughout Pittsburgh?
• Does Pittsburgh have a lot of volunteers (statistics, in general-not just teens)?
• What is the best part about people giving back to their communities?

Combining Two Questions

Same question basically, just worded a bit different:

• Which type of volunteer oppurtunities would benefit teenagers futures the most?
• Which type of volunteer oppurtunities benefit teenagers the most for their futures?

I really need to start going out and looking for different types of volunteer oppurtunites that I could benefit from and base a good project off of.

Who:

• Who will I be helping?
• Who will I interview for my project?
• Who am I benefiting and in what ways?

What:

• What is the point in volunteering?
• What are the benefits of it?
• What oppurtunities benefit you the most based on future career interests?
• In what ways do teens/young people benefit from volunteering?

Where:

• Where will I volunteer?

When:

• When will I make the time to find a volunteering oppurtunity?
• When will my volunteering be complete?

Why:

• Why am I volunteering?
• Why is volunteering important?
• Why do individuals volunteer?

How:

• How long will my volunteering oppurtunity be (if its a program, certain time fram, etc.)?
• How many different ways do people volunteer?

And I'm sure there are going to be many more things to figure out throughout this project..

Information.

Today, we went over different individuals' grad projects ideas and tried finding out their foundation and essential questions and the points that build up to it. The way they focused on finding things out helped me out with how I can maybe begin to find my essential question, and the build up process to it. Maybe one day this week I'll sit down and focus on making a list of good questions and start narrowing it down to the best I can come up with.

So I've Made Some Improvement

Today I'm getting everything done on time. I completed my list of ten sources + an extra four, I think. I always finished my essential questions sheet, which hopefully will help me come up with a really good essential question soon.

Questions, questions, questions..

In this class, they seem to never end. No matter what decision you make, what you ask, or what assignment you have to complete, questions are always thrown back at you in some way. I don't have a full-on essential question yet, but I've thought up about ten questions that can maybe help me lead up to it. I hope I end up coming up with a really good one so that in the end my project makes a lot of sense, and gets a good point across.

Yesterday,

So yesterday, I talked to Ms. Savido and she helped me out a good bit with narrowing down my topic a bit. She told me that I should mainly focus on volunteer work in Pittsburgh, and base my thoughts/project mainly on one volunteer experience that may be longer than just volunteering a few times. Today, after I talked with Mr. Hamilton I figured out a lot more about my topic. Now back to my original thought, I think I'm going to work on maybe trying to find some type of volunteer oppurtunity at a pharmacy.

So..

Okay, well I haven't posted anything on here for a few days now but I have been trying to search for some links that may relate to my topic of volunteering. It seems like an easy, yet hard topic to focus on. If you search on Google, a lot of the results that you get are just different volunteer oppurtunites, which are a plus - but I still feel like I need that main question to focus of and answer. Except, that's the hard part about all of this, I can't think of one, therefore, it's hard to think of a good search term to look up information. A few of the different volunteer ideas that I've thought about doing are, 1. volunteer at Animal Friends in the Strip District and help out with the animals there, 2. volunteer at a nursing home/hospice around where I live, 3. volunteer at Children's Hospital (I also have a cousin who volunteers there), 4. and maybe more volunteer work with R.E.I and Venture Outdoors, 5. also in April I'll be going to Costa Rica with City High so that'll be a big volunteer opportunity for me. So overall, I really just need to wait until Wednesday when I finally have my talk with a teacher and get more of a main focus, and then maybe this all will become a little easier.

Still Undecided..

Today, I searched a lot on Google for different teen volunteering oppurtunites in the Pittsburgh area. I found a good amount of good oppurtunities. I'm leaning a lot towards doing my project based a lot on something revolving around volunteer work. I'm thinking maybe volunteer at a bunch of different places and write reviews on each oppurtunity, and maybe even try to get others to volunteer with me so that it makes an even bigger impact on the company I'm volunteering with. But I'm still not fully decided, it's a really hard decision.

Still Trying To Figure Out A Good Topic

Yesterday I talked to my mom and was asking her if she had any cool ideas for me to maybe do for my grad project. She came up with one that I thought would probably be a pretty cool idea, her idea was to base my project off of the conspiracy theories of 9/11. The one bad thing about that topic is that I don't know if it's something I'm going to be able to be interested in every single day to be able to work on it and stay focused. I also took some time to search through Google a little bit to find some more topics that might interest me, some topics I thought of were something based off of voluteer experiences and what else I'd put with that topic I dont exactly know yet. And another topic I thought about was charter schools vs. public schools vs. cyber schools and all the different ways of teaching and what methods succeed and which don't. But I still have a lot to think about.

Three Answers

1. I think that in a way blogging can be healthy or unhealthy - just like any other obsession. A lot of people just do it to waste time, talk about memories/or maybe their days, or anything else. Others are using it rather than doing their real jobs and whatnot, and that could cause problems. But I think that if you really love blogging there is no problem with doing so on a daily basis.

2. Other peoples' blogs can be interesting to read so that you can understand that person more, or read about how they're feeling or their personal interests. You could learn a lot about a person through their blog and if its what someone loves doing, then they should be allowed to do so without other peoples opinions getting in the way.

3. I think that bloggers shouldn't work on their blogs at their jobs because it could cause a lot of distraction to themselves and others. They shouldn't be distracted from getting their work done at their job with a blog. Also, just to not let it become an obsession like how some people get with other sites like MySpace or Facebook, because a lot of time before you know it you're on there for hours at a time, when you could've been being more productive and doing something else more important instead.

So far, I'm not exactly sure what I want to do for my graduation project. I've considered being a Pharmacist, so I thought about maybe completing my project based on a career of interest. I don't really know any of the students who have already graduated or are currently in the 12th grade, so therefore I don't know any ideas of what their projects may have been. If I wasn't to do my project on the idea of maybe becoming a Pharmacist, I'd maybe do it based on a point of interest (like fashion, or something of that sort). Some of the main concerns I have about my graduation project would probably be that I wouldn't finish on time, but I'm quite sure that I would so that's not really an issue. Another concern would be that I'm going to eventually get bored with my topic and not want to work some days. But as of now, I'm kind of exciting to start working on my graduation project.