Entries from February 2008 ↓

Well, Hulu.com opened to the public a couple of days ago; however, I still think that it’s a bad bad idea.

Why? Because I can’t see it.

Unfortunately Hulu discriminates against Canadians and non-Americans–because of copywrong issues. What I would suggest is that you buy the tv show from Amazon instead. Sure it isn’t free, but at least they’ll let ya watch it.

Whew, this week was a bit busy with the YE’s Task 2 orientation and ACE practice presentations. Task 2’s all about Financial Analysis, so the actual presentation was pretty boring; I have a feeling that I turned a few students off of accounting. However, I’m extremely proud of the actual PowerPoint because I used no bullet points… at all! I used an example of a Pie and a Lawn mowing service to give examples of the different concepts.

Oh well.

Rachel was able to help me out and brought the mood up overall with her witty and funny announcerisms.

Also, I was very glad that a few mentors were able to come, and meet up with their teams; unfortunately most of the KSS teams failed to showed up, which will make it more difficult to get them connected. If Task 1 was any indication, this will make it way harder.

Unfortunately I had to skip the second half of the 339 class because of the orientation, so I missed Elvia Picco’s talk. However, it was interesting to hear everyone’s project updates though. Not every project runs perfectly, which is nice to know that I’m not the exception.

This week’s been… not fun. Task 1 isn’t really  working out as well as I was hoping even though it should’ve been way more streamlined than it is now. The main problem is the fact that the available times that the schools offer don’t work with the mentors’ schedules. I don’t understand why they can’t offer more times; for some reason we had more flexibility in the previous 2 years, than this current one.

I had to run out to MBSS to help out some of the teams so that they didn’t get a mentor due to the midterms and just being waay out on the Westside. This is definitely a lot more work than I was planning on. The teams had some interesting ideas: One was thinking of using toilet flushes to generate energy, another was biodegradable pencils, and the last was a “Rent-a-car” style business that rented environmentally friendly cars to teens. We weren’t able to get ahold of one team because of exams or something but I have a good feeling about these guys (and girls).

The group presentation went amazing! We were very well prepared for the questions and pretty much everyone was blown away by the in depth work that we’d put into it. Kyleen seemed to like the fact that we reviewed the other articles–which was Amanda’s idea I believe. When reading “Merging Mission…” I have to agree with the overall sentiment: it’s still an extremely relevant article that NEEDS to be read by more organizations.

In the world of YE, it’s getting harder and harder to match the mentors with their schools. Especially after many of the schools canceling at the last second (or not at all) due to midterms. It’s hard enough to organize everything, and while I’ve made some mistakes, this just erodes the mentors’ confidence in the program.