For my sophomore year, I had to take the mandatory JAGS English 10. While we did plenty of assignments that were done in that class, I feel that this project is the best work I did that year. This was a group project that I completed with my friends Aidan Smith, Ren Wolfenden, and Brady Bishman. The criteria of the project was to research one of the 17 United Nations: Sustainable Development Goals and take action in a way that was safe and probable. For my group, we focused on the 2nd goal: No Poverty.

I feel this project falls best into the take-action category as we helped our community with the problem. We decided that for our service we would attend and volunteer at a homeless shelter for a short period of time. We also asked our classmates for donatable objects (Clothes, Shower Products, Canned Food). While being at the homeless shelter, we helped by volunteering time, donating 7 trash bags worth of items, and interviewing our main connection to the shelter. 

During my sophomore year, I was in AP US history, which taught me about all the important events and developments that America has made in the past. At the time we were beginning to learn about how America got to the way it is today. From researching technologies to making bounds in the creation of food and transportation. The document below is a small cause-and-effect paper on the rapid industrialization that America went through.

I feel that this best suits this goal in investigating the world category. It allowed me to get a better understanding of how and why America industrialized as quickly as it did. It also explains the high period of wealth that comes later. Finally, it shows examples of how America became a global superpower by finding oil and other rare materials in the natural zone.

During my summer break after sophomore year, I attended one of the three Boy Scout-approved high-adventure camps. Philmont is a week spent in the mountains of New Mexico hiking, camping, and having fun. I spent the trip with many of my friends. It is a great experience as you need to care for every bit of gear you will use for the week on your back. From food and sleeping bags to tents and cookware. It was also great physical exercise as it is the equivalent of 60ish pounds of gear on your back for an average of 8 miles a day.

I feel that Philmont fills this goal perfectly as one of the main events of the hike is the mandatory conservation service project that has to be completed before the weekends. It also gave me the chance to see nature in the purest form I have seen. With the lack of human influence, the world changes such as plants growing, animals everywhere, and even the air just seems cleaner than that of a city.  

At the end of my sophomore year of high school, I attended the JAGS trip to Camp Heifer, a camp in Maryland where we got to take part in a third-world country simulator. Some of the challenges faced were things like not being able to communicate with certain countries, lack of cooking appliances, and even other countries stealing materials from you. I would describe it as if the imaginary playing you do as a child was created into something real. 

This camp best lines up with this goal as it shows how certain people would react in different situations. People who had camping or survivalist backgrounds flourished, while those who were experiencing the outdoors for the first time had trouble. Overall, it gave me many experiences from cooking a meal over fire and concrete bricks to sleeping on a pure piece of wood.

In my third year of taking a Spanish class, I was greeted with an unfamiliar teaching style. My teacher, Sra. Dria has a special teaching style where she splits the class up into groups and refers to them as familias. With your familias, you choose things like family names, pets, origins, and ages. Along with your familia, you complete many projects from finding a country to researching and “move to” to figuring out home to spend “a million dollars”. 

In the end, I had a lot of fun with my familia and we worked together pretty well. I feel it properly falls into this group as I was able to receive insight and comments on the work I did that maybe I did not know. Overall, my familia helped me and I helped them by being able to look over work of others and get my work peer reviewed.