A NEW GOAL, A NEW CHALLENGE | Personal Goal

Today I want to reflect and highlight the meaning which setting myself an ambitious goal has resulted in, and what I have done to act and reflect in pursuit of it. One of my biggest passions is on environmental sustainability, a topic which I have addressed numerous times throughout school projects and outside activities. However, I realized that in order to have greater impact, I would need to come up with a solution that I could perhaps implement within a particular community. I decided that for my Personal Project in Year 11, I would try and step outside of my comfort zone by creating a solution that could benefit areas of my school community. As this was a “Personal” project, we had to set ourselves a goal which we were passionate about that related back to us and we felt that we wanted to address. I realized that I have been meaning to address the issue of consumption and the effects it is having on our environment, I decided to set myself a goal which I felt passionate to address and also challenged me as it was not an easy task to overcome. The goal which I set myself for this project was:

“To find sustainable alternatives to current packaging and stationery solutions”

One of my biggest challenges was that I had to find a way to implement that solution within the school community in order for it to be maintained at a sustainable level and actually make an impact. Therefore, my goal also challenged me to step out of my comfort zone and find a way to implement my product and find possible collaborators such as service groups that could use packaging for their products. What really helped me to pursuit the goal was creating my own timeline to follow and actively act to reach my goal as we had limited time to achieve our goal. I then had to reflect on my progress throughout in order to reach the goal and organize myself in a way that would allow me to meet all the deadlines. I did this by creating a timeline that assured I would meet deadlines so that I could progress with the project and meet my goal:

Additionally, I set success criteria that not only measured what my product needed to be successful and achieve my goal, but also measure the extent to which I met the goal successfully. I was able to see the progress I was making and frame what qualities I needed to product to have in order to be successful.

Throughout this process, I learned that no matter how well you plan in pursuit of your goal, one should always be prepared to have to persevere at some point. I learned this whilst making a video that captured my progress to highlight the making of my product to go on my website that displayed my products. After realising that the video lacked clarity in some areas and needed more scripting and structure, I went back and re-edited it entirely. I felt that this video was an important aspect for me to achieve the goal as the website and its content made up part of my product. Even though it was less motivating to have to go back and edit most of it, I am very proud of the outcome afterwards. By planning ahead using smaller deadlines in between and keeping track of my progress was a much more effective method for me to make progress. I also learned a lot about how I can maximize my own productivity. The goal of my Personal Project was “to find sustainable alternatives to current packaging and stationery solutions. In the end, I have met my goal as I have created a concept which can be used as a potential alternative and have started collaborating with other service groups to implement the solution on a long term basis. After the presentation of our project, I wanted to measure how well others who visited thought I had met my goal. I did this through conducting a survey and graphing the results:

In the end, the solution which I came up with was using old resources from school, asking the art department weather they had old paper scraps that I could upcycle and then making my products. After I had a prototype of my product packaging, I decided to try and contact a service group here at school who sell local and organic goods from the school rooftop, called the “GardenNERDS”. I wanted to do so because I heard that they were looking for a more sustainable alternative to package their goods. Although I was challenged to step out of my comfort zone and present in front of this group to introduce them to my concept, the outcome was great because we are collaborating on the project using my proposed solution and their products to make the community more environmentally friendly in areas of production and consumption.

If I were to do this project again, I realise that I would spend more time on making variations of my product and such as I am still developing the concept to suit best the needs of what the service group is envisioning for their products. Nevertheless am I still very proud of what I have accomplished and that I have closer to addressing my passion for environmental sustainability. I really hope that this project can make a difference and am planning to take it one step further by turning it into its own service group at some point. Furthermore, I am also planning to maintain this way of setting goals; creating small deadlines for myself, tracking progress and finding a way to measure how successful I am achieving the outcome throughout. I have found that in doing so I was quite efficient in meeting my goal - but most importantly I have discovered the importance of perseverance to help you be even more successful in the end and feel more accomplished with what you have achieved.

Hannah