End of a semester- Final projects
Two weeks ago brought the end of my first year (two semesters) at Tech! It was a great time, learning a lot about my studies, learning a lot about campus, and definitely working hard. One thing stuck out to me that I wanted to share: the variety of forms of final evaluation in different classes.
For my HTS class, I wrote an essay about the History of Trash usage in America, and delivered a presentation about how the wealthiest members of society disproportionately impact public environmental views and environmental political decisions, around the world.
Some classes were normal as you would expect, and I just had to take a final exam.
But by far the coolest final evaluation I’ve had to do was in my Intro to Global Development class. We were given a list of different targets of the Sustainable Development Goals that the United Nations had so far failed to develope significant or meaningful indictators to implement and measure. It was each group’s task to create a work plan for the United Nations to go out and begin to data collect using these target indicators in order to satisfy the goals by the target date of 2030. We learned a lot about the struggles of supranational organizations in making effective and beneficial changes to the world, especially underdeveloped communities, but the best part was that in the last few days of the project we actually got to present to a United National representitive in hopes that our work plans would help those target indicators that we were studying in real-life application. We video-patched in Mrs. Jessica Epsey, one of the senior advisors to the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and gave her our presentations.
In a world of standardized tests, I never thought that our knowledge could be measured while at the same time providing insights into real-world solutions for problems of development, latching us students to real life examples of why we are pursuing our majors, and how, even while in school, we can take small steps to making the world a better place.