Over the quarantine (May and June), Mikayla and I started to discuss what we can do with our time. We wanted to give back to our community in a meaningful way. I thought back to my teaching experience in MSMUN and the need for tutoring at our school. We started thinking big, and I suggested creating an online platform where we connect tutors to students from across the world. After thinking more about this, we felt that it was too ambitious and we should refocus on creating impact within our community. We brainstormed a lot of ideas, including writing short stories that introduce academic subjects or volunteering at orphanages. However, we realized that the first may be too time-consuming and can take a while to be impactful, while the latter required COVID regulations to be more lenient. We turned to our Service Learning Coordinator, Ms. Tina for help. I talked about the original tutoring idea and our thinking process. She agreed that tutoring within our school is much more feasible and effective in creating meaningful impact and positive change.

Mikayla and I just launched the Academic & Interpersonal Mentorship Program for high school students to tutor middle school students. This project involved a lot of planning, meeting time, and organization.

Some challenges:

• Creating a realistic timeline – there are many events occurring at this time and we want to find the best timeline not only for us, but also one that accommodates high school & middle school students
• Possible COVID restrictions
• Thinking about online and in-person tutoring sessions, and how we are going to monitor the quality of tutoring

Through communicating with Mikayla and Tina, I further improved my leadership and communication skills, which would be useful in my other extracurriculars.

Reflection video attached below.