About Me



Hi everyone! I’m Sarah Hammond and I am a Senior at BASIS Scottsdale. I will be majoring in Computer Engineering next year, although I don’t quite know what I want to do with my life yet. But for now, I’ll be volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, working to create a youth outreach  program.

As for my life outside BASIS, I have a dog named Loki, a lizard named Mory, and a large collection of very friendly minerals. I enjoy reading, singing, and hiking. This blog will document my journey into the future (aka the next four months) as I explore the world outside school (wow it exists???) and learn more about myself (which is scary).  -SH
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Week 1

Hi everyone! The first week of my internship has passed relatively smoothly (as smooth as anything ever goes for me)(other people may not consider it smooth)(what is smooth, really???)(not my parking let me tell you). The parking situation was ... interesting my first day and I am really regretting not learning to parallel park. Also the office is right next to train tracks and there are lot of one-way streets which I hadn't driven in before, so I was a little out of my comfort zone.


Anyway, once the parking/driving situation was handled my On-Site Mentor, Cassandra, gave me a tour of the office and introduced me to everyone. The office was much larger than I had initially expected and there were so many people working there; people in charge of home renovations, emergency home renovations, finance, and so many people in accounting. I realize my perception is most likely skewed and that there are way less people than there would be at a big company like Motorola or something, but it seemed like a lot in comparison to my previous (nonexistent) experiences. Everyone was so, so nice though and I felt super welcomed.


After the tour was complete, I was given orientation, which was basically more background on Habitat for Humanity as a company and how it is run. Fun Fact: Habitat for Humanity was not created by Jimmy Carter, as many people believe. He was a big supporter, however. One of the most common misconceptions about how Habitat for Humanity works is that houses are given away or donated. Really, the recipients pay for the house with sweat equity, which is basically the hours they put in to build it, as well as interest free loans. Side note: I was given a cool cup!




The next day I officially started working. For groups of high school kids there is a homelessness simulation basically where everyone has a character and they have to try to find housing (adults pose as officials at apartments, shelters, etc.) and the students try to find a place to stay on an extremely limited income. While the simulation is good for high school aged kids, the back stories of the characters can get pretty dark and there are a lot of references to drugs and alcohol and suicide, so I'm trying to tame down the backstories. It was also a PDF so I'm just redoing it in Microsoft Word so that it's in a more current format.
Before
After
More boring perhaps, but less potentially scarring for younger kids.
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Week 10



Wow it's the final week! It seems like I just started this project and it is already coming to an end. Anyway, I'll get right into it.

First an update: the Gilbert Christian event that was supposed to happen this week ended up getting cancelled by the high school and they decided to volunteer at the Restore instead, so the stepping stone activity was not actually used this week. It still can be used in the future though if any opportunity appears and it will be all planned out and convenient though!

The office was closed for Good Friday this week, so I only came in on Wednesday and Thursday. Wednesday I continued to work on the Youth Presentations from last week, which I will give an example of below. This is just an example of one slide, which I have included the kind of before and afters of editing.

Original
slide original.PNG




Final


So essentially what I was doing was making the slides less dense and simpler so a kid would still be able to understand them. Of course, I didn’t just get rid of all of the information. I added the information from the original slide in the notes section of the new slide, wording it more simply, so that when presenting someone can just say all of that verbally. I thought that the kids were unlikely to read that big section of text, and likely would not be able to understand all of the words. Having the notes section encourages people to talk more casually instead of just reading from the slides, which I think all of us are learning with our Senior Research Projects.

Thursday (my last day!) I worked on the presentations some more and also helped label and cut post cards that were going out to former Habitat for Humanity board members (me and the paper cutter got to know each other very well). There were cupcakes and ... well that's it!

I just wanted to thank everyone who made this possible; my On-Site Mentor, Cassandra, as well as my faculty advisor Dr. Sahu and our group leader (??? is that the title I don't actually know) Ms. Conner. Finally, thanks to all of you guys for reading and commenting eachweek! I look forward to hearing from you for almost (we've still got the final post IT'S NOT OVER YET) the last time on this blog. So I wish you guys luck on APs and finals or whatever else you have as the school year ends and hope you have a good summer!

11

Week 9

Hi everyone. Hope you guys had a good week! I'm out for spring break but you'll hear from me again next week for my final post :)
6

Week 8



Hi everyone! So there’s actually a holiday today; it’s César Chávez Day, but it is also National Bunsen Burner Day and Eiffel Tower Day so we can celebrate those as well. I had a pretty productive week and finally finished the lesson plans, so you will be happy to stop hearing about those after this post.

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Wednesday I worked on the middle school lesson plans once again (same as the last couple weeks, just updating links and statistics) until 1pm, when the public speaking training started. It was a really small group of three of us and then the teacher and he went over basically how to talk about Habitat for Humanity, whether it be in a casual conversation or a formal presentation.

The first thing he focused on was preparation, which is a pretty common piece of advice for presentations. Don’t wing it, obviously. But another part of preparation was field work, he said, actually volunteering on Habitat builds so you could share the experience, as well as researching your audience.

Next he emphasized finding the purpose of your presentation, whether it be to perform, persuade, or inspire, and make sure that every part of your presentation matched this purpose, ending with a call to action. He also talked about the structure of a presentation or speech and the importance of an engaging opening that explains why you believe what you believe, which would lead into the whats’ and hows’ later in the presentation.

Lastly, he discussed some common mistakes people make when presenting, separating them into preparation and deliver mistakes. Some mistakes in preparation were not preparing, not listening to your audience, and not including a call to action or next steps. Mistakes delivering included filler words (“umm”, “like”, “so”), double clutches (restarting your sentence in the middle), poor eye contact, and bad pacing (making your speech too short, too long, rushed, or lagging).

Thursday and Friday after finishing the lesson plans I worked on revising some youth presentations that already existed, making them easier for kids to understand and more aesthetically pleasing. The presentations were mainly to explain what Habitat did, but they were not engaging enough and oftentimes had blocks of text with complex words, which is what I’ve been trying to alter.

Next week I will be on spring break, hopefully relaxing and I hope you guys have a fun time (as much as possible) as well!
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Week 7

Hey everyone!! Happy National Chocolate Covered Raisin Day I hope you enjoy it.

This week I returned to the lesson plans, which I continued updating Wednesday and Thursday (don’t worry, I’m not going to go through that process once again). On Friday I finally finished the lesson plans for high school and elementary school students, which I emailed to Cassandra. I also downloaded the lesson plans that hadn’t needed to be altered and sent them to her, just in case the page of the website with all of the lesson plans is ever taken down.

After that, Cassandra had me go on her computer and make sure the formatting was correct in the older version of Microsoft Word, as well as move all of the files from her email to the Lesson Plans folder. There were so many folders and subfolders in computer I had to ask her the correct path three separate times before I actually got them to the correct place.

Just as I finished doing that, Cassandra pulled me out for a surprise meeting.

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(you thought I had run out of these gifs, didn’t you) (I never run out)

Anyway, the meeting was with Americorps and Habitat for Humanity International and Cassandra wanted me to talk about the youth program that we had been developing. It was kinda scary since I hadn’t really prepared anything but I basically just summarized what I had done at the internship so far. I first said that I had mainly been going through the preexisting resources that Habitat International had, updating them, and making them more relevant to Habitat for Humanity Central Arizona. I talked about the Housing Simulation and how I had updated it and made it more appropriate for smaller children. After that, I talked about the lesson plans I had been working on more currently and how I had been updating broken links and statistics. Apparently the people who made the lesson plans was no longer with Habitat so they hadn’t been updated, and they actually asked me to email them my revised ones so my version might end up on the larger Habitat for Humanity International Website! There is also a way to flag broken links apparently which I didn’t know about, but it was probably faster to just update them myself.

That’s it for this week! There is some sort of public speaking training I’m supposed to do next week, so we’ll see what happens there.
19

Week 6

Happy St. Patty’s day everyone! Thankfully I was not sick this week, so it was back to work as usual.

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I took a break from the lesson plans to focus on finding an activity for the kids at Gilbert Christian to do since we will be coming to their school in April. The teachers their said they didn’t want a lesson plan or simulation, but instead something physical they could do at school. My On-Site mentor, Cassandra, also said that she wanted it to be something cheap they could make, costing 25 dollars or below.

With these constraints, I thought of making concrete stepping stones, which I used to do when I was little, because cement mix is really cheap and it's a fun project since you can imprint your handprints and decorate the concrete with marbles or stones. Getting the cement mix is easy and cheap, since each bag is about 4 dollars, however it was the molds that we would pour the cement into that proved to be problematic.

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When I made them as a kid, I just bought a cement mold which was about ten dollars, but that would be extremely expensive considering there are sixty kids who would each need their own mold. So I had to find an alternative to buying actual stepping stone molds. The first thing I did was try to find other people's solutions, which mainly seemed to involve buying a concrete form tube (this is basically a giant tube you pour concrete into to make posts) and cutting it up into two inch circular sections which you would pour the concrete into and then leave to dry on a plastic sheet. This would be over 25 dollars though, and require the kids to be in groups of three, so I tried to find another option.

I ended up with two options:

Option #1: Groups of 3 (Some groups of 2)

2 bags of Concrete Mix
$6.50
Concrete Tube Form
$11.52
Plastic Drop Sheets
$4.97
Topping Concrete
$5.97
Total:
$28.96

Other Materials:
Wheelbarrow/Bucket
Trowel/ something to smooth out concrete
Decoration materials

Potential Problems:
Tube form needs to be cut ahead of time
Stepping Stones would need to stay on drop sheets for several days; either staying in same location with a lot of room or cutting up the drop sheets into smaller sections
Kids would have to bring decoration materials

Option #2: Groups of 2 (Some groups of 3)

2 bags of Concrete Mix
$6.50
Plastic Drop Sheets
$4.97
Topping Concrete
$5.97
Decorative Gems
$8.97
Total:
$17.44 or $26.41

Other Materials:
Molds - Kids could bring in cereal boxes
Tape/Scissors - Maybe school could provide? To cut the cereal boxes
Wheelbarrow/Bucket
Trowel/ something to smooth out concrete
Decoration materials

Potential Problems:
Cereal box may get soggy and deform while concrete is drying
Kids would have to bring in cereal boxes and school would have to have tape and scissors
Kids would have to bring in decoration materials or there might not be enough

I talked to Cassandra and we decided that I should try using a cereal box as a mold, and if it worked we would use that method.

So umm tune back next week to find out if it works wow!!

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