Anderson's Blog

Service

Charity Art Club Installation Artwork

The name of this event is called 2021. For this event, we gathered 30 CAC members to make a big installation artwork, the artwork is composed of 28 papers, each member will take 1 A3 paper and make an artwork about a social issue they want to explore, we gave members 25 social issues and they could sign up for the topic that they were interested in. Although this is not a big project, I encountered some problems but it helped me grow a lot.

problems: as we are making this project, we also recruited 7 new executives, and on the first new exec meeting, things were a little bit awkward, the atmosphere was not really good, and I also assigned them jobs on their first day here which is a terrible decision. I felt like I gave them a lot of pressure. Another problem is we implemented a structure for executives, in which it is seperated into three branches – Activity coordinator, social media, designer, I wanted one old executive to be in one of these branches and guide the new executives through our every event. However, it wasn’t sucesful on the first day, after reflecting, I realized that the problem was I only told the old executives to teach them, but I didn’t TEACH the old executives how to teach the new executives, so I gave the old execs a really detailed guide on how to do everything and what they are suppsed to do in each meeting. In the second executive meeting, everything worked out very good.

Another problem I encountered was that on the first member meeting, only 10-15 people came but a lot of them did not inform us about their absence, it was really upsetting. After the meeting, the execs held a quick reflection meeting, we reflected on why people wouldn’t come and made some adjustments:

1. We rearranged the chair and tables,  made them into groups so people could feel more comfortable. It also allowed them to talk to their friends which made them feel less pressure from us seniors.
2. We put lofi music as background
3. We didn’t walk around like we were checking their artworks, instead, the execs sit in a group and also worked on their own artworks like they are apart of the members.
4. We turned of the light to make the atmosphere more comfortable.
5. Send email on friday and send a reminder email on Monday to remind members to meet.

Finally, on the second and third meeting, we got 30+ members in the classroom.

I would consider Sep as the hardest month for me (both club and academic) there was a time where I was extremely upset in myself and my abilities to manage a club, and there was one instance when I cried in front of the execs, but after that incidence, I actually realized how great this club is, the execs were all super devoted into this club, everyone put their best effort into everything despite how busy they were. As a leader, I made a lot of changes to myself and the club, and I am really happy to see the growth. I am looking forward to more challenges in the future and hope that I can improve more on leadership.

Creativity

I finally achieved my goal for my sports science blog, I reached 500 followers. So I made a simple post on my blog to celebrate this moment.

Activity

It’s almost basketball season, so I strated training. I started by doing rehabs and light intensity exercise because I haven’t trained for a while so my knees would be very weak for any exercise, for my arm, I got a chronic damage in my tendon so I had to keep doing rehab.  Throughout this process, I’ve learned the lesson of patience, I hated doing rehabs and I hated the feeling of “building” things back to where I originally was, but I had to keep doing these boring exercises because if it went too intense, my tendon would never heal and I could injure myself again.

 

Creativity

During the lockdown, I want to learn something new so I decided to learn how to cook, I’ve always thought cooking was really time-consuming and tedious work, but after giving it a try, I found out that cooking by myself makes me feel very accomplished.

I realized that I began to cook more frequently the last two weeks, I used to hate cooking because it’s always the beginning that’s hard, cooking itself is not really hard, but what’s hard is telling myself to get up from my seat and go cook. I always worry about how cooking is time-consuming, but after some shower thoughts and before-bed thoughts, I realized that I spent 3-4 hours on my phone a day during this lockdown, meaning I definitely have the time to cook, I’m just lacking time management skill and motivation during this period, which is why I think cooking is wasting my time. So the next day, I began to time myself cooking because I’m trying to convince myself that cooking doesn’t take long. I started with easier meals at the beginning, such as fruit yogurt and a grilled cheese sandwich, which only takes less than 5 minutes. Then I made some other meals for lunch and dinner (vegetables soup, chicken breast, eggs) After a week, I began to try harder meals, I tried the grilled pork ribs, which actually took me 1 hour, but by this time, I’m already enjoying the process of cooking.

(lol i forgot to take a pic before i eat)

Throughout this process, there is only one challenge, which is time management, I’ve been constantly trying to convince myself that cooking doesn’t take long, to do this, I make time blocks to schedule my time, I gave myself 1.5 hours now for cooking per day, and that covers 4 meals per day. This reduces my screen time and motivates me to become more productive too, my screen time has significantly decreased this week compared to last week (first week of lockdown 5-6 hours sometimes 7)  last week (3-4 hours) this week (1.5 hours per day) I’ve realized that eating good food actually motivates me to do productive things. It is amazing to see so many benefits of cooking by myself, I’m no longer spending tons of money eating ubereats, less screen time, better time management, one most important thing is that cooking helps me “recollect” myself during this lockdown, the sudden change made me down during this period because I’m lacking motivation every day even though there’s tons of work chasing behind me. I personally think that cooking is one major factor that helps me regain some discipline.

I never knew cooking could have an impact on other aspects of my life which I thought is really cool, this experience makes me want to try more things that I previously didn’t want to do because I can discover many more benefits.

I’ve learned many meals so far, here are 4 meals I’m most proud of:

1. Tomatoes Vegetables Chicken Noodle
2. Sesame Oiled Pork Liver
3. Grilled Pork Ribs
4. Golden Tofu

 

 

Service/Creativity

This Tuesday I joined the DEIJ committee meeting, which is a committee that is an open space for students to talk about justice and initiate programs to make some changes in their community. We had a really great meeting on Tuesday and the ideas we discussed about resonated with everyone. We brought up how it’s not only people of other races that discriminate asians, asians discriminate their own people too, for example, the tension between Taiwan and China is a really big problem. We also talked about performative activism, especially how people constantly share. posts about social justice but in reality these posts only brings people’s attention to it, not many people will actually change themselves because of the posts. To be honest, we can’t do too much about this issue, because prejudice are always there, it’s just the social norms that makes people to not express their prejudice, so I think we should still focus on social media, but instead of making posts that directly tell people “not to do this, not to do that” we can make posts that tell interesting historical stories relating to a certain country. For example, I made drawings about my great grandfather’s story during Cultural Revolution, my goal is to humanize each individuals, because often times, we generalize a population based on one individuals act, just like how many people think Chinese people are bad because they dislike Chinese government, or how people only recognize yellow skin people as asians. I asked the members to collaborate with me and I decided to do a collaboration between DEIJ and Charity Art Club.

REFLECTION: at first I was pretty nervous to get into the committee because there are actually some topics that I don’t fully support or agree, for example, majority of the members in the committee see gender and sexuality as a really important subject, but I myself don’t really pay attention to this issue. But this committee is very open and safe, and I what I learned.in this committee is communicating with people who have different ideas. The discussion was really fun, we couldn’t stop talking once our ideas resonate with each other, I really loved the environment and I will surely continue to participate.

This is the image that I posted, I talked about my great grandfather’s experience during the cultural revolution.

I also continued to work on my CASSPORTSSCIENCE account

Activity

Volleyball season finally ended, so it’s offseason now, therefore, I want to prepare myself for basketball season. 4/26 is the beginning of first week, so I just completed Monday and Tuesday, I learned more about scheduling my plan, for example, I learned that I should increase 5% of the training intensity each week so I won’t get injury. A few months ago, I always wonder why I keep getting knee discomfort. But through experiences, I can keep improving my plan. Compared to the first ever plan I made in October, I think I have improved a lot.

Service and Creativity

In April I continued my Kinesiology Blog and I had some work experience with sports companies.

For the social media, I continued to make posts about various aspects in kinesiology, and my followers gained to 360. this helped me to gain some recognition and an executive (Rae Lee Min Kim) from Dari motion, which is a biomechanics assessment company contacted me to work together.

They sent me data statistics of NFL and D1 college athletes, and I analyzed an athlete named Lil Jordan Humphrey who plays for the New Orleans Saints. And they told me give training suggestions based on the data statistics. Below is my brief description of the athlete’s problem and suggestions. It is really exciting because Mrs.Rae told me she would continue to work with me in the future, and after learning I haven’t gone to college yet, she told me she would start to officially work with me when I get into college. This experience was also really cool because I got to analyze an NFL player’s statistics, and this player followed my account too after learning about me. This experience allowed me to gain experience to work with adults and made me to start exploring topics that are specific for football players. This makes it a “service” in CAS because  I am serving people outside my community this time.

 

Activity

For activity, I learned how to create a more professional periodization and plan for my vertical jump, this helped me to consider from all aspects and I also learned how to asses myself.  I separated my program into 4 phases, 1 phase is 5 weeks, the doc below is the first phase, in which I’m trying improve my maximal strength because it is curerently the factor I’m lacking for my vertical jump. each exercise is considered carefully, for example, after I do squat, I do exercises that put less pressure on the joints because squat is already very harsh on my joints.

I’ve been following this program for one week now but I got stomach flu again…I have to start from the beginning because after one week of no training I have high risk to get injured if I suddenly expose my self to high intensity training.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve made 6 more posts, and I gained 153 followers which is really surprising. I covered many topics and majority of them are focusing on protecting legs (specifically focusing on knees) for example, I talked about common myths about knees over toes and how to become stronger at knees over toes position since it is inevitable in sports activities.

SKILL I LEARNED: reading medical journals and simplifying them

 

This CAS project challenges time management because I have a schedule of when to post the content, my schedule for posting is Monday, Thursday, and Weekend. But sometimes I fail to follow the schedule completely.

I believe I did achieve the goal to expand my account outside of my community, because right now, 60% of the audience are Taiwanese outside of my school and community, there was a few moments that people actually thanked me for making these content, which really motivated me to do more. This shows that I actually influenced some people I don’t know.

This CAS also involved with activities, for example, the images above shows me doing knee strengthening exercises, now I just need to film what I do and explain the reasons behind these exercises. I am aware that every follower is different, so they might not be able to perform certain exercise like the ATG split squat, so I told them to self-evaluate if they could perform such exercise, and I told them what makes them “capable” of performing that exercise, I also provided another knee strengthening exercise that is for everyone.

This also challenges my creativity because I have to think of appealing templates that will attract the audience, I believe my design is getting better and better in each post, the words are getting bigger, colors are more appealing now.