I am a Senior at UC Santa Cruz majoring in Sociology with an intensive concentration in Global Information and Social Enterprise Studies (GISES) and minoring in Education. My goal is to travel the world exploring new cultures, traditions, and cuisines in order to achieve a holistic view of the world while becoming balanced in mind, body, and spirit.

I am a recent graduate of UC Santa Cruz with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. This experience of working with everyone in C.O.G.U. has really inspired me on what the future holds. I have created new experinces with this project and am very proud of what we have achieved, and everything we will individually achieve in the near future.

I am in my fourth and final year at UC Santa Cruz, studying Anthropology and the Anthropocene. The opportunity to work alongside GCIT's students has been exceptional in teaching me intercukltural sensitivity and the vast array of thoughts we can have towards a thing we call happiness.

Our technology for social change approach was collaborative learning on various different tech applications such as Weebly and Knightlab. Through these platforms, we were able to learn tech alongside the GCIT students and develop our own digital skills to execute our website and story map. All team members had skills that were a benefit to the project, and it was these skills that we aimed to further develop while teaching each other about our own skills. Discussing each other's strengths and weaknesses we were then able to apply ourselves to our respective teams contingent on what skills we had and wanted to develop. This evolved into 5 teams:

1. Script and Research

2. Videography

3. Story Map

4. Graphic Design

5. Website Design

Working with students on an international level comes with its challenges but we learned to overcome those obstacles with communication and flexibility. Understanding that we each have personal, professional, and educational aspects in our lives helped us progress our collaboration through planning and navigating all our busy schedules to then find the time and space to be present and in the moment.

This project helped us think deeper about how western colonization has affected the way we get information about other countries and their people. We approached this project with a more open mind and had deliberated on how to represent the people of Bhutan without influencing the information by painting them in a light that has any sort of predetermined connotations. Our main goal was to ask how they wanted to show themselves, what they wanted to show and give an explanation of why. Instead of imposing what we thought was the best approach to addressing the social issue of lack of rural representation on the internet, we listened to the approaches the GCIT students wanted to take and make decisions surrounding their wants and needs. We learned how to listen rather than talk; how to suggest rather than impose; how to collaborate rather than dictate. Oftentimes our Western culture catalogs and displays cultures, traditions, and languages with an intention to “help” communities and document historical occurrences. However, through this project, we have come to understand that a better approach would be to help these cultures, traditions, and languages document and catalog themselves..