May Project 2019

Chloe Frank May Project Journal Due 5/29/19 For my May Project, I volunteered in University City Children’s Center’s infant room, where I fed, changed, and entertained eight babies. Over the four weeks I spent there, I bonded immensely with the children, as well as the teachers there. I am going to miss it like crazy and plan on visiting as much as possible during the next three months. The following are different stories and observations about the people I spent my time with, all of whom I completely adore. Mandi is one of the teachers in my classroom and she has been such a sweetheart to me since day one. She is an endearing oversharer so I feel like I know much of her backstory now. After having her first baby when she was fifteen, she decided she loved children and wanted to be a mother figure for as many kids as possible so this job was a natural fit for her. I noticed her maternal instincts toward not only the kiddos but also towards me very quickly, a role she was hap...

On Monday, Sandeep and I taught a kindergarten again.The school was Sorrento Springs Elementary School in the parkway school district. This elementary school was weird to me because school started at 7:30. That seemed very early for kids to be up and active to me. Our classroom was interesting because every once in a while, the kids would have movement breaks where they would dance to kids youtube videos. They also had recess and snack time during the middle of one of the lessons. One little girl named Maya was a very good participant during the activities. As she got up from her desk to run outside for recess, she looked me in the eyes and said “AWW I miss my mommy.” With a straight face and a sad tone in her voice. I felt sad for her. But she seemed to forget about it when she came back in. This day of teaching was problematic because most lesson incorporate discussion into them. Because the kids are in kindergarten, the questions are often time easy and fun to answer. This caused mo...

This week has been something. Monday we taught at Cuivre Park Elementary school in Troy, Missouri. It was an hour drive away but I had music so it went by a little faster. When I arrived, the teachers were waiting outside with a speaker playing kids bop for the kids. I cringed and went into the main office to wait for our other boss and the other volunteers to arrive. Our 5th grade tour guide, Mckenze, then led us to her classroom. The teacher was very nice and helpful; she had snacks laid out for us and bottles of water. I immediately tried to figure out who the problem child would be. Then he presented himself, his name was James. He did not do any work but he participated in the activities at least. There was a nice little girl with glasses who kept asking me for help. She was very eager to learn and then she told me why she kept asking me for help. She told me that she was Autistic and she thought all the other kids in the class hated her because of it. I tried to reassure her, b...

For my remaining 40 hours of service, I went to Drey Land with Olivia L, Mia, Max, and Will F. The trip was so much fun! A couple of days before we left, we went grocery shopping as we were responsible for bringing our own food. On the way to Drey Land, we stopped at IHOP in Rolla before we realized we missed our exit and that we were a little lost. Thanks to Mia's direction skill via Maps, Max, Mia, and I soon found our way and gave directions to Olivia and Will who were in the other car. When we got to Drey Land, we were soon put to work. Over the course of the next few days, we stained cabins, the Lodge, and the Pavilion, weed wacked the entire grounds, cleaned mouse poop off of the shelves in the Lodge, cleaned bathrooms, swept cabins, and did basically whatever else Mr. Dee thought needed to accomplish. After we finished working each day, we were able to do pretty much whatever we wanted and would spend the afternoon swimming, building bonfires, and playing Cards Against Human...

Because I am a master procrastinator, this massive blog entry is more of a reflection than it is a real-time account of my May Project experience. My apologies for that! However, I have done my best to make it engaging and I have consulted my real-time handwritten journal which includes some accounts of May Project. Preparation / May Project Planning Day Today I first meet Nancy Willimon, an accomplished stained glass artist, mother of Beau Willimon (creator of House of Cards ), and possibly the most enthusiastic person over the age of 60 I have ever met. It seems that she loves everything she does. She describes to us the necessary attributes of a plausible design for a stained glass window, and we begin brainstorming. (After designs are due, we meet with Ms. Allison and Ms. Oates to discuss Mrs. Willimon’s suggestions and to design final proposals.) Today I also meet Ann Dockery, the volunteer coordinator at the Crisis Nursery, who explains what goes on at the nursery. In...

My last days volunteering at Kingdom House for May Project I helped Misty who heads children and adolescent services. I organized Misty's office and shredded some documents that she needed to get rid of. I then helped her with the meal sheet tally which basically consists of taking the government meal count worksheet and filling it out with the number of meals that were available each day and the number of people they served each day. To do this, I take the catering production sheets and copy down the number of meals the catering service provided onto the worksheet and then figuring out the number of kids who were present by totaling the kids' personal attendance sheets. This was a little tedious, but with earbuds in it was pretty relaxing. I then had to take all of the government worksheets and match them with the corresponding meal production sheet, hole punch them, and then put them in order by the dates in a binder.  On the last day, I took a pause from filling out meal ...

The next few days at Kingdom House I shredded papers for Samantha at the senior center. I had never shredded so many papers in my entire life. Samantha had inherited an entire tub of documents dating back to the 90s that she and the other senior center employees had never had time to deal with. There were copies of credit cards, social security cards, and other identity compromising documents that I needed to get rid of. For four days, when I came to Kingdom House I would plug in my earbuds, play some good music, and try to shred as many papers as I could before the shredder burnt out. After the shredder continuously burnt out, I decided to grab a shredder from the adolescent office in the other building so that I could continuously alternate shredders. This method worked pretty well until about day three when the second shredder started to break, jamming at the slightest presence of thick paper. It then eventually broke and was basically spitting out whole, perforated ...

After my poor experience at Annie Malone, I transferred to Kingdom House. Even though I have volunteered at Kingdom House before, the numerous amount of programs Kingdom House has to offer means that I am constantly having new experiences while I am there. When I came that Wednesday (my 2nd day of May Project) they needed me to work in their market. The Market at Kingdom House is like a mini store that is heavily discounted so that the Kingdom House community is able to buy healthy food (including fresh produce) at a heavily discounted price. The Market is pretty small, about half the size of a typical Burroughs classroom, but is equipped with a couple long shelves that contain cans, dry pasta, rice, cereal, and the occasional miscellaneous snack, and a couple of fridges in the back that contain deli meats, dairy products, fresh produce, and meats. When customers come to the market, they pick up a shopping basket against the wall and then shop their hearts out...to an e...

Day 11:  I did two hours of work this day at JBS under Mrs. Bahe, as I figured out I was short a few hours after biodreyland.  I washed out and cleaned all of the forest kits that were used at dreyland. Day 12: I finished up the rest of the service hours with Mrs. Bahe.  I mostly organized a lot of the Grand Canyon trip names list of attendees and figured out all of who had the paperwork that was necessary to participate, such as health release forms.  After this I helped her clean out all of the kits from the river parts of dreyland. Day 13:  Today was my last day for May project and it was also my last day at Barnes.  I started off the day at 7:30 and went into surgery and got to see the end of a gunshot wound case that came into the hospital in the middle of the night.  It was super interesting as they were closing up the minor blood vessels when I got there and to see them do that with a bovie and clamp combination was pretty cool.  I then...

On Monday all the senior counselors gathered back to Burroughs to grade the packets. We arrived at around 8:45 and immediately began the task. My session was downstairs and we were grading forest packets for both session 1 and 2 while the first session was upstairs grading stream packets.  We were each given a stack of about four packets and also an answer key. We graded page by page until periodically we would switch with someone next to us. The process was not as bad as I thought it would be and it was actually really fun to be in a room with everyone again. They also had lots of snacks and pizza for lunch (even though I had to scra pe off  the cheese, it was still delicious). We eventually finished grading much earlier than expected and when we were done, we tracked down Mr. L so we could "hit the craw" one last time. I would say the most memorable part of the grading was the grading of Kiran's forest packet. Jan was grading it during our session 2 packet grading time ...

Day 9:  On day nine I shadowed Dr. Geraghty, another of the vascular surgeons that works alongside Dr. Sanchez.  This day was particularly fun as he had a style of performing the surgery that I really enjoyed, and that was to listen and sing along to September by Earth Wind and Fire has he performed the surgery.  He made the surgery really fun and did an interesting technique where he performed the fistula superficially and put the vein in the bicep in a different location closer to the surface of the skin to make the process of dialysis a lot easier on the patient and the nurses administering it.  The new location makes finding the vein a breeze.   After this I bounced to another surgeon, Dr. English, who was a lot of fun and was doing a carotid arterial bypass.  He showed me everything he was doing and all the techniques that he was using to do the procedure, and also played really good classic rock during it. Day10:  I shadowed with Dr. Jim today ...

Day 7:  Today I was the second day that I went around with Dr. Sanchez!  It was an interesting day that held two different kinds of endo-procedures that are minimally invasive and are worked through using X-ray, angiograms, and ultrasound technology as you cannot see what you're doing.  The first case was required the implantation of a renal artery stint.  The reason for this was because at the patient's advanced age he had stenosis which is when a vein or an artery narrows due to a number of reasons, in this case it was becoming calcified.  The stint aims to create a clear pathway with a greater diameter than before without breaking off the calcium as that can lead to internal bleeding.  The second case was brief and similar to the first as he just attended during the "critical phase" of a procedure that one of his fellows was performing in another part of the vascular department. Day 8:  This day I only had one case with the surgeon I was shadowing...

For these days I have been shadowing in the vascular surgery department at Barnes in conjunction with the WashU med school.  I have thoroughly enjoyed it so far as I have always been super interested in the human anatomy and how to fix it when things go wrong as it can be both complex and quite simple.   I am shadowing through a connection to the chief of the department, Dr. Sanchez. Day 5: it was a pretty straight forward day, I was not with Dr. Sanchez but with one of his associates, Dr. Ohman and a senior fellow, Thomas.   They performed the longest procedure that I have observed that lasted seven straight hours.  The procedure was an angiovac, which is where they make small incisions just above the knees and below the neck on either side where they put in tubing to create a synthetic new pathway for the blood as they close off arteries on either side.   They then take a wire with a small plastic hook on the end and insert it into the veins through the inci...

I apologize for the tardiness of this because it was last week and I have four other days to cover tomorrow but here is the story of BioDreyland Session 1. To accurately describe I must lead in with the fact that I had planned to hang with a group of friends the night before, unaware that we were to leave Sunday morning and it was Saturday night.  I realized that I had misread the email en route to my friends and had to turn around and go to the store to get the gear that I did not already own and pack everything.  Nevertheless, the next morning hit and and I was prepared to go out into the wilderness with a horde of 9th graders.    Day 1:  We got onto the buses and Collin and I proceeded to doze off intermittently, and when we weren't dosing we halfheartedly sang along to the golden albums of Taylor Swift, AKA the only true country ones.  When we arrived we all unpacked and got our stuff into the cabins after a brief orientation and finding out who was...

I just got back from bio drey land yesterday, and it was one of the best experiences ever. We left on Wednesday and got there and it was so interesting to view the drey land process from a different point of view and not as a participant but as a counselor and mentor. I'll highlight some of the highs and lows for y'all. Upon arrival, we were split into 4 groups with three counselors in each group. I lucked out with my counselors because I was in a group with Nandini and Kate Stengel, two people I adore, and we got super close because we spent the majority of each day with just us three and our freshman. However, our group wasn't as good... We had multiple problem children who were either rude, bossy, or just didn't do any work. From the other counselors, it sounded like we were the only group with kids like this, but we dealt with it and got through! The first night we had our cookout and oh. my. god. We had to go to the south gravel bar and start a fire to cook the ste...

Hello all, I decided to start my May project on Wednesday instead of Tuesday because I went to bed at 7am on Monday. I am doing Junior Achievement with Sandeep and we are at the Chesterfield location, right next to Top Golf. Our first day we sorted kits. When volunteers go out into classrooms, they take a kit filled with activities. The remaining activities are recycled and reused in new kits. This saves JA around $40,000 every year. So me and Sandeep sorted and organized the components of the kits into separate piles. Towards the end of the day Ami, a director, asked us to teach in a classroom of second graders on Friday. We didn't really have an option because we are volunteering for them; we agreed. Thursday was kind of similar to Wednesday. We recycled kits, but something bad happened! It appeared that I somehow got sick from working in the office Wednesday. A lot of the kits were used during the winter months. My theory is that the little kids touched all over the stuff with t...

So last Thursday, my sponsor published one of my own personal essays on to her newsletter along with the little blurbs I had written the day before! ( check it out here! ) After the article was published, Ellen, my sponsor, said that my work had received a lot of praise and attention from people who had written to her (not gonna lie, this felt AMAZING)! She even said someone had read it who lives in University City and wanted to do a little local news story about me and Ellen and I working together! (maybe you'll see me on TV lol). All in all, Thursday was a great day. Then Friday was a lot more chill. I did a few summaries in the morning and spent the afternoon doing some research for a diversity assessment Ellen (also she wants me to call her Ellen so that's why I'm referring to her as Ellen and not Ms. Mcgirt) is working on. This was one of the more boring things I've done so far, but still very interesting. Basically, I had to go back to Fortune's archives about...

So today, the writing I had done yesterday was published on one of Fortune Magazine's daily newsletters, Race Ahead! Very exciting. Also today, my sponsor gave me more articles to write blurbs about and the number grew from 4 (like yesterday) to 10 today. It took a while (I wrote over 15,000 words today), but I actually enjoyed writing them. One of the things I wrote about was this new PBS special about African Americans in business which was very interesting. I also wrote about the challenges daycare providers face in New York City, and everywhere for that matter, and a blurb about a new bill that could prevent LGBTQ people in Texas from accessing healthcare. All these articles are things I wouldn't normally read, so I'm glad this internship is opening me up to new media outlets I wouldn't normally use. It's definitely broadening my perspective.