Alexandra Baldwin

First, I’ve learned a lot about myself and the people in my grade. Through so many different challenges throughout my ICE year, I’ve learned which people to lean on for certain challenges, and what my strengths are in a new setting. I’ve learned that I’m really good at staying positive during times of uncertainty. During winter camping, I was one of the people that lead the way in telling stories around the fire, and I was one of the first people to do the dishes. I didn’t know it, but I didn’t need to be scared on that trip! I was really skeptical about this trip. At first, everyone was saying that we were all going to freeze and nobody was going to have any fun. But through that experience, I learned that I was good at keeping a positive mood in the group, and I found people that were similar to me in that way and stuck to them throughout the entire trip!

I’ve also learned a lot about myself academically. During the year, we’ve made projects with so many different forms of media. Podcasts, mini documentaries, infographics, brochures and maps, etc. I’ve learned that I’m really bad at making infographics! No, rephrasing that. I’m great at them, but I spend WAY TOO MUCH TIME focusing on the tiny little details that nobody will ever see! Since I’m a perfectionist, I like everything to be just how I like it. Sometimes, life just doesn’t work like that, and in the instance with infographics, it sucked all the time out of other projects I could have been working on. I’ve realized that they aren’t a good use of my time and I always just obsess over the dumb things. This is why I chose to do a podcast for my final ICE project, it’s more simple and I can worry about the things that actually matter, like the interviews and sound quality!

I’ve learned so much from civics about what being an active citizen in my community is, and how that can help myself and others in so many ways. For years, I just viewed citizenship as mowing your neighbours lawn to be nice, or donating some gloves to the clothing drive. But it’s not just that, it’s more like a mentality. It’s saying that nobody deserves any better treatment than anybody else, and when you’re given more, you can try and even out the scale and help the less fortunate.

During the last week, as my sister and I were scrolling through my tik tok page (I must say, I am a little addicted!) we came across this account. This woman, going by the name Kim because she wanted to remain anonymous, was trapped in an abusive relationship with her boyfriend. Before the coronavirus, any time she wanted to go see friends or have people over, she’d have to ask him first. She had no control over her personal finances, he had found a way to get her income to flow directly into his bank account where she had no access. She tried to leave the relationship when it started to go sour, but since she has a child with this man, he threatened to hurt the child if she left. When she called the police on him, he locked her in her car and threw food at her. Before doing ICE, I would have felt terrible, but I probably would have just moved on. But now that I’m so much more educated on what’s happening around the world, my sister and I decided to DM her on tiktok and just show our support. We got her paypal information, and donated $15 to help her. Although it may not be much, it shows that we’re there for our community.

I think I’ve personally benefited so much from this ICE experience, and I personally think that everyone should have this for one year during their high school experience!