Here is the take for our final project that we've worked on for a year!

My creativity total would add up to about 50 hours.  While the blog posts didn't show the rest of the 20 hours, I decided to place all my Talent show hours (which goes beyond 20 hours) into my creativity aspect.

Creativity was probably the hardest for me to accomplish because I had little creative outlet.  I had to quit flute for the sake of my school schedule and was left with the Talent Show for any creative outlet, which I was thankful for.

To go deeper into everything we've put into preparing for the talent show(s), I'll start with the beginning.  First, we choose a korean pop song we want to dance to.  Since all the members joined the  group on the basis of Korean pop, a korean pop song was only appropriate for choice.  Later on, we'll learn the choreography first.  Many korean pop songs have music videos centered around their choreography(and sometimes even have their choreography as the main deal), which makes our task a lot easier.  Later on, we decide on placement on stage.  Since one person can hog all the spotlight to herself and we usually have a different amount of members from the korean pop groups' member number, we have to create our own transitions to ensure that all of us have a decent amount of spotlight on stage (whether that be a special move or dancing in the middle of the stage etc).

Then, we'll edit the music to fit our specific needs.  Last year, one of the members who graduated edited the music to fit the time criteria and choreography we've learned.  We'll then get matching outfits and choose which aspect of the outfit we decide to match and which aspect of the outfit we decide to be unique with.  We'll then go through the process of the perfect makeup look for each of us and we have made our talent show group!!

Since the Talent Show is our big project this year, I'll go in-depth with what we did specifically this year.  This year, we actually learned a bunch of choreography from different songs so we could choose at the end which choreography we wanted to use from our arsenal of choreographies but like last year, we went with a completely different song during the summer.  That's why we prepare early, right?  After getting down the choreography (which, this year's choreography was especially hard), I mixed the music to fit our criteria.  Since Gangnam Style was all the rave last year, we added a small portion of Gangnam Style in our dance to celebrate the popularity of one kpop song! Afterwards, we went shopping for the perfect outfits.  Our outfits are less matching this year to fit the song's theme and we shopped for as many cool accessories as we could find and afford on ebay that would still match the theme.  We even have a small flash mob ready for the audience for the talent show to really close off our last year as NSN(Not So Nerdy).

With the choreographies I've mentioned, I could think of some ethical implications.  We basically just took the choreography choreographers made for the groups and used it for our own little talent show.  However, I believe that it is alright because we are using it in the song that the choreographers used it in.  If people were to search up the song due to curiosity, they would still gain full credit.  Also, we manipulate the choreography to fit our 2-people group and had to make our own transitions in the choreography.  If anything, I'd like to think of us as spreading the kpop love and the love for their beautifully done choreography!

So the Talent Show has been a huge part of my high school career and this friday's going to be the last time!

My action hours totaled to around 81.25 hours in the past 1 and a half years, with most of my hours coming from going to the gym or practicing for my talent show dances.

When I first began to exercise, my main goal was to lose weight.  As a regular teenage girl, I had insecurities just like any other teenage girls and wanted to tone up my body to fit my perfect perception.  I didn't have anything ridiculous in mind (and my lack of self control would prevent anything ridiculous anyway) but I just wanted to improve my then out of shape body.

Surprisingly, I ended up exercising much more than I expected to.  In fact, I exercised way more than 81 hours (though these are the only hours I've managed to document).  Afterwards, I felt a lot better in my body.  Even though I didn't lose much weight because I had horrible self control when it comes to food, I managed to build up an immense immune system as well as feel much more comfortable in the body I've created.  The activities I've done in the gym has went beyond just physical appearances which were great.

On a daily basis, I would usually run and go on the elliptical machine for about 30-35 minutes, than I would move on to my 8 minute abs exercise (courtesy of youtube) and go about another half an hour on different weights at the Recreational Center at Texas Tech University.

I've learned through my experiences that exercising helped me with different aspect such as physical strength and my mental health as well.  My head was a lot clearer and thinking came about much easier for me when I exercised daily (or enough in a week).  I've managed to get past my out of shape body and running for more than 5 minutes before completely giving up.

Recently, I've been having troubles keeping up with exercising because of my IB schedule.  However, I'm hoping to go back on a tight schedule (maybe not as tight as before) and continue to build up immune system and gain some muscle while relieving any stress that might be in my pent up system!

My service hours totaled to 64 hours and 45 minutes.  I had more service hours from volunteering at places such as the volunteer center but everything posted on the blog was the bulk of my service hours.

As noted through my blog posts, volunteering at the American Red Cross took up the majority of my summer and the majority of my service hours.  While I volunteered previous summers, this summer was probably the most productive summer as well as the best summer in terms of volunteering for the Red Cross.

At first, I planned on going to the Red Cross and doing the usual, such as filing things away and cleaning up the typical mannequins with baby wipes.  However, this summer had much more planned for me than what I thought it would have.  My volunteering specialist, Molly Mabery, is a sweet and an over-achieving person.  She wanted to make a bigger difference in the South Plains area through the recruitment of more volunteers, especially in some of the more necessary fields such as the Red Cross disasters team.  Thus we started our goal in helping Molly achieve her goal to make a bigger difference in our community and the communities surrounding us.

First, the volunteers split up the North Texas region into 3 parts and searched up as many churches as we could in our respective parts.  I took on the East Panhandle area and searched up close to 400-500 churches in my area.  After the initial planning period, one of the volunteers and I started to call these churches (which totaled to around 1000 churches when we combined both our searches) and asked them to help spread the Red Cross mission through their bulletin boards or weekly announcements.  If the churches agreed, all we had to do was either e-mail, fax, or physically mail all the posters and information to the churches for them to put up these information for the churches and gain our volunteers through this method.  After everything was done (which took us a good 2-3 weeks), I personally wrote letters till my fingers almost fell off to these churches and physically mailed them and e-mailed the rest of the churches when the local Red Cross office was out of greeting cards.

At first, all the planning of this whole thing was getting to my head.  I thought that it would be impossible to finish a big project such as this in the summer alone.  However, our planning proved me wrong as I managed to go through every single step before school started and I had to abandon my volunteering hours to go to school.

Also, there were times when I'd wake up and lull myself back to sleep.  On those days, I tried to guilt trip myself into going and tell myself about the positive effects of the efforts of everybody at the Red Cross.  If everyone at the local office could convince themselves to wake up and do good for the community, I should have absolutely no problem with it. I was glad for being able to clock in over 60 hours at the American Red Cross through this summer alone.

Through this experience, I was a lot closer with the staff at the local office.  Whenever I decide to visit the office to see the staff after this summer, they would all kindly welcome me and talk about daily news with me.  In fact, the volunteer specialist wrote an exceptionally kind recommendation letter for me when I needed to apply for universities and even scholarships.  Of all the recommendations I've received, her recommendation letter might have been the most in-depth of them all, which shows how close we were through this experience.

Also, I've learned to get over my shyness through the hundreds of calls I had to make.  When the other volunteer and I first started to call churches, she had to make all the calls because I was too shy to even speak a word with the churches.  After a while (mainly because she couldn't go to the local office every single day), I had to man up and call these churches on my own.  Soon, it just became a daily process and while I still felt a little nervous when I first pick up the phone when I reach the office in the morning, it was a lot simpler than how I was when I first started in the beginning of this whole experience.

I also gained a new close friend out this experience.  The other volunteer(as I mentioned a couple times above) soon became a close friend as we are currently taking Calculus together here at Lubbock High.  Through our experiences together, we would sometimes trade secrets with each other that no one else have known (if she wasn't lying and I definitely am not lying).  Because of the situation that brought us to become friends, we might know about each other more than some of our other close school friends know and it was really great to know that I found a friend in her through this experience.  In fact, we are hoping to keep in touch and go to Korea together sophomore year of college and have the time of our lives!

Beyond the volunteer recruitment, I also realized my strengths through my helping the local office with online volunteer management.  After recruitment, if people were interested in volunteering, they would apply online.  This was my favorite section because computers are absolutes joys to work with (which is also why I'm going into computer engineering).  Online Volunteering management helped me secure my strength with computers, ultimately leading me to apply for computer engineering by the time university applications rolled around.

On top of everything else I've learned, I also feel that my volunteering effort wasn't put to waste.  After our assertive ways of recruiting increased the volunteers who signed up online or called through the office.  Especially after Hurricane Sandy, I was really happy to know that the American Red Cross was one of the biggest supporters in helping the people in the East coast get back to their every day life.  Even though I didn't directly help the cause, I felt that this experience has allowed me to contribute more to such a cause than I ever could have.

That being said, this situation allowed me to tackle new challenges to directly help causes such as the effects of Hurricane Sandy.  I would love to be able to directly help one day (possibly through the American Red Cross because of my lovely experience with the people in the local chapter) and tack on another chapter in my life of helping others.



Julie Song
Volunteering at the Red Cross
2 hours
Service

Today I went to the Red Cross to volunteer and met 2 other girls (whom I met last time) but this time we spent our time looking up churches on the internet in our areas (Mine was the Northeast area from Lubbock)  to promote the Red Cross and get people to volunteer for the Red Cross in those areas.  I can also volunteer from home and search up churches as well.  Later on, we would call them to ask them to help promote us (with some Red Cross fliers, etc).


Julie Song
Red Cross volunteering
1hour and 45 minutes
Service

Today I went to Red Cross and 2 other volunteers and I worked on helping the Red Cross with categorizing their volunteers into the right areas (including many from way outside of Texas) and while it was a completely new system to be working with, Molly, the volunteer specialist, walked us through the process.  We managed to get a hang of what we were supposed to do.

Here is the take for our final project that we've worked on for a year!

My creativity total would add up to about 50 hours.  While the blog posts didn't show the rest of the 20 hours, I decided to place all my Talent show hours (which goes beyond 20 hours) into my creativity aspect.

Creativity was probably the hardest for me to accomplish because I had little creative outlet.  I had to quit flute for the sake of my school schedule and was left with the Talent Show for any creative outlet, which I was thankful for.

To go deeper into everything we've put into preparing for the talent show(s), I'll start with the beginning.  First, we choose a korean pop song we want to dance to.  Since all the members joined the  group on the basis of Korean pop, a korean pop song was only appropriate for choice.  Later on, we'll learn the choreography first.  Many korean pop songs have music videos centered around their choreography(and sometimes even have their choreography as the main deal), which makes our task a lot easier.  Later on, we decide on placement on stage.  Since one person can hog all the spotlight to herself and we usually have a different amount of members from the korean pop groups' member number, we have to create our own transitions to ensure that all of us have a decent amount of spotlight on stage (whether that be a special move or dancing in the middle of the stage etc).

Then, we'll edit the music to fit our specific needs.  Last year, one of the members who graduated edited the music to fit the time criteria and choreography we've learned.  We'll then get matching outfits and choose which aspect of the outfit we decide to match and which aspect of the outfit we decide to be unique with.  We'll then go through the process of the perfect makeup look for each of us and we have made our talent show group!!

Since the Talent Show is our big project this year, I'll go in-depth with what we did specifically this year.  This year, we actually learned a bunch of choreography from different songs so we could choose at the end which choreography we wanted to use from our arsenal of choreographies but like last year, we went with a completely different song during the summer.  That's why we prepare early, right?  After getting down the choreography (which, this year's choreography was especially hard), I mixed the music to fit our criteria.  Since Gangnam Style was all the rave last year, we added a small portion of Gangnam Style in our dance to celebrate the popularity of one kpop song! Afterwards, we went shopping for the perfect outfits.  Our outfits are less matching this year to fit the song's theme and we shopped for as many cool accessories as we could find and afford on ebay that would still match the theme.  We even have a small flash mob ready for the audience for the talent show to really close off our last year as NSN(Not So Nerdy).

With the choreographies I've mentioned, I could think of some ethical implications.  We basically just took the choreography choreographers made for the groups and used it for our own little talent show.  However, I believe that it is alright because we are using it in the song that the choreographers used it in.  If people were to search up the song due to curiosity, they would still gain full credit.  Also, we manipulate the choreography to fit our 2-people group and had to make our own transitions in the choreography.  If anything, I'd like to think of us as spreading the kpop love and the love for their beautifully done choreography!

So the Talent Show has been a huge part of my high school career and this friday's going to be the last time!

My action hours totaled to around 81.25 hours in the past 1 and a half years, with most of my hours coming from going to the gym or practicing for my talent show dances.

When I first began to exercise, my main goal was to lose weight.  As a regular teenage girl, I had insecurities just like any other teenage girls and wanted to tone up my body to fit my perfect perception.  I didn't have anything ridiculous in mind (and my lack of self control would prevent anything ridiculous anyway) but I just wanted to improve my then out of shape body.

Surprisingly, I ended up exercising much more than I expected to.  In fact, I exercised way more than 81 hours (though these are the only hours I've managed to document).  Afterwards, I felt a lot better in my body.  Even though I didn't lose much weight because I had horrible self control when it comes to food, I managed to build up an immense immune system as well as feel much more comfortable in the body I've created.  The activities I've done in the gym has went beyond just physical appearances which were great.

On a daily basis, I would usually run and go on the elliptical machine for about 30-35 minutes, than I would move on to my 8 minute abs exercise (courtesy of youtube) and go about another half an hour on different weights at the Recreational Center at Texas Tech University.

I've learned through my experiences that exercising helped me with different aspect such as physical strength and my mental health as well.  My head was a lot clearer and thinking came about much easier for me when I exercised daily (or enough in a week).  I've managed to get past my out of shape body and running for more than 5 minutes before completely giving up.

Recently, I've been having troubles keeping up with exercising because of my IB schedule.  However, I'm hoping to go back on a tight schedule (maybe not as tight as before) and continue to build up immune system and gain some muscle while relieving any stress that might be in my pent up system!

My service hours totaled to 64 hours and 45 minutes.  I had more service hours from volunteering at places such as the volunteer center but everything posted on the blog was the bulk of my service hours.

As noted through my blog posts, volunteering at the American Red Cross took up the majority of my summer and the majority of my service hours.  While I volunteered previous summers, this summer was probably the most productive summer as well as the best summer in terms of volunteering for the Red Cross.

At first, I planned on going to the Red Cross and doing the usual, such as filing things away and cleaning up the typical mannequins with baby wipes.  However, this summer had much more planned for me than what I thought it would have.  My volunteering specialist, Molly Mabery, is a sweet and an over-achieving person.  She wanted to make a bigger difference in the South Plains area through the recruitment of more volunteers, especially in some of the more necessary fields such as the Red Cross disasters team.  Thus we started our goal in helping Molly achieve her goal to make a bigger difference in our community and the communities surrounding us.

First, the volunteers split up the North Texas region into 3 parts and searched up as many churches as we could in our respective parts.  I took on the East Panhandle area and searched up close to 400-500 churches in my area.  After the initial planning period, one of the volunteers and I started to call these churches (which totaled to around 1000 churches when we combined both our searches) and asked them to help spread the Red Cross mission through their bulletin boards or weekly announcements.  If the churches agreed, all we had to do was either e-mail, fax, or physically mail all the posters and information to the churches for them to put up these information for the churches and gain our volunteers through this method.  After everything was done (which took us a good 2-3 weeks), I personally wrote letters till my fingers almost fell off to these churches and physically mailed them and e-mailed the rest of the churches when the local Red Cross office was out of greeting cards.

At first, all the planning of this whole thing was getting to my head.  I thought that it would be impossible to finish a big project such as this in the summer alone.  However, our planning proved me wrong as I managed to go through every single step before school started and I had to abandon my volunteering hours to go to school.

Also, there were times when I'd wake up and lull myself back to sleep.  On those days, I tried to guilt trip myself into going and tell myself about the positive effects of the efforts of everybody at the Red Cross.  If everyone at the local office could convince themselves to wake up and do good for the community, I should have absolutely no problem with it. I was glad for being able to clock in over 60 hours at the American Red Cross through this summer alone.

Through this experience, I was a lot closer with the staff at the local office.  Whenever I decide to visit the office to see the staff after this summer, they would all kindly welcome me and talk about daily news with me.  In fact, the volunteer specialist wrote an exceptionally kind recommendation letter for me when I needed to apply for universities and even scholarships.  Of all the recommendations I've received, her recommendation letter might have been the most in-depth of them all, which shows how close we were through this experience.

Also, I've learned to get over my shyness through the hundreds of calls I had to make.  When the other volunteer and I first started to call churches, she had to make all the calls because I was too shy to even speak a word with the churches.  After a while (mainly because she couldn't go to the local office every single day), I had to man up and call these churches on my own.  Soon, it just became a daily process and while I still felt a little nervous when I first pick up the phone when I reach the office in the morning, it was a lot simpler than how I was when I first started in the beginning of this whole experience.

I also gained a new close friend out this experience.  The other volunteer(as I mentioned a couple times above) soon became a close friend as we are currently taking Calculus together here at Lubbock High.  Through our experiences together, we would sometimes trade secrets with each other that no one else have known (if she wasn't lying and I definitely am not lying).  Because of the situation that brought us to become friends, we might know about each other more than some of our other close school friends know and it was really great to know that I found a friend in her through this experience.  In fact, we are hoping to keep in touch and go to Korea together sophomore year of college and have the time of our lives!

Beyond the volunteer recruitment, I also realized my strengths through my helping the local office with online volunteer management.  After recruitment, if people were interested in volunteering, they would apply online.  This was my favorite section because computers are absolutes joys to work with (which is also why I'm going into computer engineering).  Online Volunteering management helped me secure my strength with computers, ultimately leading me to apply for computer engineering by the time university applications rolled around.

On top of everything else I've learned, I also feel that my volunteering effort wasn't put to waste.  After our assertive ways of recruiting increased the volunteers who signed up online or called through the office.  Especially after Hurricane Sandy, I was really happy to know that the American Red Cross was one of the biggest supporters in helping the people in the East coast get back to their every day life.  Even though I didn't directly help the cause, I felt that this experience has allowed me to contribute more to such a cause than I ever could have.

That being said, this situation allowed me to tackle new challenges to directly help causes such as the effects of Hurricane Sandy.  I would love to be able to directly help one day (possibly through the American Red Cross because of my lovely experience with the people in the local chapter) and tack on another chapter in my life of helping others.



Julie Song
Volunteering at the Red Cross
2 hours
Service

Today I went to the Red Cross to volunteer and met 2 other girls (whom I met last time) but this time we spent our time looking up churches on the internet in our areas (Mine was the Northeast area from Lubbock)  to promote the Red Cross and get people to volunteer for the Red Cross in those areas.  I can also volunteer from home and search up churches as well.  Later on, we would call them to ask them to help promote us (with some Red Cross fliers, etc).


Julie Song
Red Cross volunteering
1hour and 45 minutes
Service

Today I went to Red Cross and 2 other volunteers and I worked on helping the Red Cross with categorizing their volunteers into the right areas (including many from way outside of Texas) and while it was a completely new system to be working with, Molly, the volunteer specialist, walked us through the process.  We managed to get a hang of what we were supposed to do.

Hey I'm Julie Song
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