Mission Purpose and Hypothesis

My mission group has been working on creating a photography club for our students, and so far, it has been an enjoyable experience for me.  Our purpose has been nearly fulfilled, though we are still working on getting a grant or sponsor to provide money for us.  However, we have all in all cooperated well together, so I think our work is and will be coming along very nicely.  We think that if we create this photography club, we can use it to motivate students to work harder, learn better, and ultimately be successful in school and life.  We think that if we can do this, we can improve our school.

Real World Skills I’ve Learned

At first I think that some of our group members didn’t exactly understood our priorities at first, and rather wanted to socialize before working; but we quickly learned that unless we all worked together, no work would ever get done; no progress would ever be made.  So, we all learned to cooperate together, even if our group was a bit larger than the others.  Some of our group members were–crazier–than others, but even they cooperated and finished what needed to be done.  This is a life skill I have learned.  When you are in a semi-large group, with people of varied personalities, it is a good thing to focus on the work being done, and not focus on distractions such as other people.  I know that, in a future job, perhaps, this might happen to me.  You cannot afford to be too distracted and never let your work be done.  You have to cooperate with all the people in your group, no matter how eccentric they are.  You assign them a job that suitable, and you watch the work be done. You might be surprised that people will agree to work so easily, but they will know what is important.

Another life skill I learned was how to write under pressure, and also how to begin working on an 8-page grant application form, plus the grant itself.  You will feel stress when you are trying to focus on both working on  a grant and a grant application.  I finally decided that I could alternate between both, while letting my group-mates work on the other part.  This was a good method until we rearranged our priorities; then I had to be working on the grant full-time, not the grant application.  However, I knew that later in class we would have time to work on it when we were done with the actual grant; plus I could also be working on it at home.  This taught me how to be responsible with work; how to manage your time while letting other people do their part as well.  This will be a good life skill; I know that I will use it often outside of school.

When you are writing a grant, you need to sound like a responsible young adult, not like an immature middle-schooler.  You have to write strongly, with good grammar and spelling, paired with even better language.  You need to be able to persuade the people reading your grant that Yes, you should give us money for our cause.  This was a skill I learned: how to write with authority, with intelligence, but also from the heart.  You need to be able to convince them that you need them, and that your dream will die without them.  This is a skill I will most definitely use as I reach adulthood; to write with authority will be a skill I will use often.  For job resumes, college essays, letters to important people…the list goes on and on.  This is an important life skill I gained while working with my mission group; I hope we all learned it together while writing our grant.  We will need this skill.

Challenges We Encountered

An example of a challenge we encountered was staying focused on our major priorities, and figuring out what those priorities were.  This was a challenge for me, especially, because I wanted to do everything at once while still remaining sane.  This was not possible.  This challenge was a hard challenge for us because like I mentioned, we were a semi-larger group then others.  Also, we had a lot of work to do.  We actually had 2 grants we were/are working on at the moment: a Doodle for Google grant, and a Corporation Grant (which is the grant with an 8-page Application).  I knew that my group would, at times, become frustrated with the work and each other.  But we kept working, and we eventually were able to re-focus on our priorities; the result of this was that we got the work DONE.

In the beginning of our mission, we were faced with a small challenge of splitting up our people into seperate jobs.  We knew that the work should be evenly split up, but we wanted to let people also work on what they wanted to work on.  This was a challenge because we wanted to let the grant they were working on to be most compatible to their strengths; but we didn’t want to have to force them to do it.  However, this worked out quickly because most people did want to work with what they were good at, so there was a pretty even split.  When we first began, however, there was a scuttle of confusion over this challenge.

Another challenge was figuring out our priorities in order to work on them.  We had no idea what to do!  And I’m not sure if we all understood the teacher’s directions at first; but we asked her about what she meant and what she needed, and soon we got to work.  Still, though, our group was drifting away from each other and becoming more distracted by the moment.  This was a challenge because so many people were beginning to be off-topic, and we had no priorities because some of us still were not understanding what to do.  Finally, we straightened out what we knew we needed to work on, found our main priorities, and became the successful group we are now after overcoming this challenge.

Solutions We Tried

To solve these challenges, and others, we tried many solutions.  (This is an example of one of them.)  We began to work.  In the beginning, we were confused, and not serious about mission, mostly fooling around instead of doing work.  However, as we gradually made progress in our project, we realized we had to make BETTER progress.  We had found not just one, but TWO possible grants that we could qualify to win.  We had to work on this, because these two grants were our new priority; and we didn’t realize this till it was almost too late.  But we had to start writing.  We did, and it worked.  We got work done much faster, ans we were totally prepared to share our mission as soon as we got the grant money from the grant(s), which we had worked so hard on.  How could we not win?  This solution both solved a somewhat amjor challenge in our group and brought our group closer together through steady cooperation.  This was a solution our team came up with together, and it brought us closer together.  We became a better mission group, and we became better workers.

Eventually, we reached another bump in the road.  We were working, but each group member was consistently working on the same thing.  This would not let our group contribute each of their different talents into each grant; and this should not have been happening.  We quickly evaluated this problem and came up with a solution by ourselves.  We decided that everyday, different team members would work with a different job.  A couple of team members would work on one grant, some other group members on the second grant, and one or two group members would be working on the grant application.  This was a good method for us as a way of working without having to deal with the monotonous of the job, because each day you would be working on something new.  This was what worked for us.

Another solution of ours was re-focusing after one of our team-members got off track.  When we worked on our mission, we were working mostly on computers, so it was easily to just open a new tab and check our email, or go on Youtube, or something else distracting like that.  Our solution without having the teammate getting in trouble was to respectfully remind them to keep working, because without them we couldn’t make as much progress.  Sometimes would suggest them to close the tab if they seemed especially distracted.  This worked very well 99% of the time, which was basically what we needed.  This was a good solution for our group in keeping them focused on what needed to be done.

Next Steps

Our next steps in our mission is to send out one of our grants, becuase the deadline is coming up, and then finishing and eventually send out the second grant and its grant application, and finally, we will hopefully be transforming our idea of a student-led photgraphy club into reality.  These are our next steps because these are what is necessary for our group, and eventually our school.  This is the work needed to be done so that our mission purpose can be fulfilled and our mission hypothesis tested.  This is what must be soon completed; for they are what we must do.  The next steps are the most important part of our project.

Favorite Part of the Process

My favorite part of the mission project so far has been working on the grant.  I have been able to both improve my skills as a professional writer and prepare myself for a future that will need this skill.  I have liked this part of the process because of that, and also I simply like writing.  This mission has led me to learn new skills of cooperation with people in  a large group, and also I have learned how rearrange my priorities in an order that will benefit both me and my work.  All in all, however, this whole mission process has been enjoyable to me.  I have to truthfully say that WORKING has been my favorite part of the mission process.  🙂