Ellia Chiang ’21, shares the personal growth Outreach and Prep has given her.
This summer 25 students were accepted in the CSGC grants program. These grants are funded due to the generous support of the Cost, Earle/Mendillo and Workman families, who established endowment funds to support the community and public service endeavors of future generations of Deerfield students. For more information on these grants please visit: https://deerfield.edu/csgc/grants
As the summer comes to a close, our program has recorded over six hundred tutoring sessions in both one-on-one sessions and group lessons. As more students joined throughout the summer, we created three summer intensive camps that ranged over a period of two weeks (three classes each week), which were all conducted through Zoom. The intensives included topics such as geometry, grammar, and Algebra 1 and to conclude each camp, a final test was given to help reinforce topics gone over during the two weeks. In addition, our mentoring program has grown far from when we first started; we have accomplished many one-on-one mentoring sessions and officially finished our mentor video series. Each episode responds to questions about prep school life as well as personal experiences and all these videos can be found on our website and on our social media. For the past few months, we have also been sending out feedback forms to our students to make sure that our program is as helpful to them as we can be. Their words were very impactful and I am happy that we could be of such help.
As for some updates on the summer contests that were mentioned in my previous post, we chose three winners for our creative writing challenge, each of them were rewarded school supplies and a backpack (the stories and pictures can found here: https://www.outreachandprep.com/programs). I also decided to extend the deadline date for the independent project to the end of August to allow new students to participate and I am excited to see what our students have created.
Through Outreach and Prep, I was not only able to provide students “stability and an outlet to grow” as I noted per my last post, but I was also able to learn and grow myself. Helping run this program has taught me how to connect with different people and organizations, to utilize social media to promote, to organize things on a multitude of platforms, to explore new ideas and take risks, to learn from and recognize mistakes and challenges, and to adapt and be flexible in certain circumstances. I’ve definitely grown as a person and I’m very thankful for this experience. I’m also grateful to everyone who has helped and dedicated their time and effort into Outreach and Prep. Our tutors and mentors have all worked hard with planning their sessions with our students. After talking to many of our team members, I was happy to hear that they have also learned many things during the process. So, I think overall this whole program and experience has been a two-way learning process for everyone – for me, for the students, and for our team.
