Week 8 in the Sig Series

This week started out in absolute chaos. The volunteer opportunity that I thought I was going to be doing fell through the floor. Essentially, what happened was the director of the place didn’t feel as though they had anything they could really offer me aside from clean-up duty. Maybe I didn’t do a good enough job of explaining what it was I was trying to accomplish for the digital story project. I don’t really know. There were some other obstacles as well. I would not have been allowed to photograph anything and the timeframe wasn’t very convenient for either party. Luckily, my professor had presented another opportunity on our weekly discussion board and I immediately jumped on it. I will now be interviewing and writing the life story of a member of the local Senior Center. And, they seem more than happy to help me fulfill the requirements of the project. I will say however, that I do feel a little bit of pressure. The story I will be writing is meant for the family members of the person I interview. It’s a memoir of sort, so I am a tad bit nervous about it.

The Capstone project is also well underway. I’ve completed the first two milestones, but I’m still unsure of which topic I want to write about. I’ve concentrated my research in the general direction I want to go in, but I would still like to narrow it down. As I said before, choosing the exact topic is the most difficult part for me. I think I tend to have writer’s remorse or something because I’ll choose a topic and then wish I had written about something else. Hopefully, I will have it narrowed down by the end of next week. Actually, I will have no other choice because I have a deadline to meet.

If there was one thing I learned this week, it was that the statistics of the social decline in America are astounding. I’m not sure how current they are because the story we had to read by Robert Putnam was written in 1995, but if that trend has continued it would be really disappointing. I was shocked by the statistics he presented. As I said in my weekly posting, I still feel that many people do take an active role in their communities. However, I guess statistics don’t lie. I am curious to see how they have changed in the 13 years since Putnam wrote the story. Sometimes, all it takes is time to make things better. On the other hand, time may have only made them worse.

Josh