It feels like just yesterday we were writing our first blog entries. At the time, I was a little shorter, a little more naïve, and I had full year of unfamiliarity to unravel. Now, here I am today writing my final blog entry—hopefully a little taller—with some of that naivety replaced by the truth that comes with experience, and with two years of countless failures, numerous successes, and thirteen pretty incredible people to look back to.
More than the experiences themselves, however, I feel it was how we choose to deal with the experiences that gave us a holistic understanding of who we are today. If it weren’t for all our feedback sessions, for instance, I would have probably never recognized the harm I was doing myself when taking on so much work at a time. I would have probably never been encouraged by a group of people to start saying no, to challenge others. And on top of that, would I have recognized that most of the things I had to work on came from an even bigger underlying fear of disappointing others? Were it not for the IA, I would have probably drifted through my last two years in high school with the goal of simply achieving good grades, but never stopping to think whether those grades reflected me becoming a better student or a better person.
So thank you for that, for giving me the time to really get to know myself and to recognize whether who I was aligned with the person I want to become.
The image of our first IA class still lives vividly in my mind. We were all sitting down on the floor, and Mr. Topf was talking about how money and grades act as extrinsic motivators for most people. He then made a point of asking us why some organizations are able to inspire and others are not. The answer lay in that people don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it, and those companies that are able to inspire had that why; they had a purpose.
More than the experiences themselves, however, I feel it was how we choose to deal with the experiences that gave us a holistic understanding of who we are today. If it weren’t for all our feedback sessions, for instance, I would have probably never recognized the harm I was doing myself when taking on so much work at a time. I would have probably never been encouraged by a group of people to start saying no, to challenge others. And on top of that, would I have recognized that most of the things I had to work on came from an even bigger underlying fear of disappointing others? Were it not for the IA, I would have probably drifted through my last two years in high school with the goal of simply achieving good grades, but never stopping to think whether those grades reflected me becoming a better student or a better person.
So thank you for that, for giving me the time to really get to know myself and to recognize whether who I was aligned with the person I want to become.
The image of our first IA class still lives vividly in my mind. We were all sitting down on the floor, and Mr. Topf was talking about how money and grades act as extrinsic motivators for most people. He then made a point of asking us why some organizations are able to inspire and others are not. The answer lay in that people don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it, and those companies that are able to inspire had that why; they had a purpose.
Being the first group of students in a pilot program was not easy; we were often told that we were taking the easy way out, that all we did was cut fruit or edit movies. But I think most of these things were said simply because the approach we had towards learning was different, and it’s easy to associate different with wrong because there’s comfort in doing what “everyone else does." At the end of the day, however, I also think the reason we were able to see past people’s comments, and the reason we didn’t really mind being the “outcast” of such a traditional paradigm of education, was because we had a clearly defined purpose in everything that we did, and more so, we had the freedom to speak up if we felt that at any point this purpose was lacking.
I think it’s fair to say that all thirteen of us - while being in the same program - have all had a completely distinct experience, and that’s because the autonomy we’ve been given has pushed us to take control of what we learn and how we choose to learn it. There’s been a lot of times where we’ve debated whether we have enough content in the IA, but as we go off to college, and we enter a world with less structure than we had in high school, I realize that more than content, it's important that we know how to deal with the uncertainties that life poses. And autonomy is often exactly that; it’s knowing how to take that uncertainty and mold it into an answer with reasoning.
I think it’s fair to say that all thirteen of us - while being in the same program - have all had a completely distinct experience, and that’s because the autonomy we’ve been given has pushed us to take control of what we learn and how we choose to learn it. There’s been a lot of times where we’ve debated whether we have enough content in the IA, but as we go off to college, and we enter a world with less structure than we had in high school, I realize that more than content, it's important that we know how to deal with the uncertainties that life poses. And autonomy is often exactly that; it’s knowing how to take that uncertainty and mold it into an answer with reasoning.
At the beginning, one of the things that scared me the most about the IA was the fact that I was going to spend all day, three times a week, with the same 13 students—most of whom I didn’t even know very well. Now, it’s the one thing I’m most afraid of leaving behind. It hasn’t really hit me yet, and I think the moment it’ll hit is when I get to UF and I no longer have Corey’s room to walk into and shout, “Hey fart face” to Pedro sitting on the couch. We’ve been told endless times that relationships matter, but the IA has proven that for me. From the time we were filming our first “It’s story time!” videos, to the time we were all up (including Gonchi) until 4 am editing the documentary, or cutting fruit when BlendZ was just getting started, it’s crazy to think how much has happened within those four walls of Corey’s room, which has become like a second home with a second family. So thank you for that. I’m going to miss our way of being a whole yet always being individually unique. Were I to wind the clock back two years, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the IA all over again.