Smera Doshi Senior Project 19-20

We spent the past week working with PDC to help them with their competitions. The State Leadership Conference is coming up in April, and since this is their first time competing at States, they are reaching out a lot for help. One team especially, Introduction to Business Presentation, has both Daniel and Andria from PDC on it. We have been spending a lot of time showing them how to put together a professional PowerPoint. They have completely formatted and submitted their prejudged PowerPoint, and now they are working on adding animations for States. Overall, it has been a productive weekend helping PDC with their competitions. Attached below is a picture of one of their PowerPoint slides.

I have not been making my senior project my top priority.  I have been very busy in other aspects of FBLA, as we had our regional competition a few weeks ago. We had to organize chapter activities for the conference as well as work on the press updates after the conference. On top of this, FBLA-PBL week was the week after the conference, and I was bombarded with work. Swim season also just started, and I have been working on finding a work-life balance. However, I do understand that my senior project should remain a top priority and I have worked a lot this weekend to help PDC on the FBLA activities they are doing. We are working on 3rd speaker applications, as well as PowerPoint skills, and we will be having a meeting this weekend to catch up. I have also let my laziness get to me, as I often find it hard to motivate myself to get work done. I have also been spending a lot more time with my family and friends instead of working on FBLA, which has caused my senior project to take...

FBLA-PBL week is this week, and we are responsible for hosting activities every day of the week to increase hype around the event. We are also working on a social media challenge for everyone to be engaged in. PDC has helped plan it, and they have brainstormed 5 days of social media challenges. However, this past week was Bay Section, so PDC spent a lot of time studying for their competitions, and all of us have qualified to move onto the State Leadership Conference. This week, PDC will be working on encouraging members to come out to FBLA-PBL week activities, as well as keeping up with our social media challenge and updating our member base on it. Below are a few pictures of PDC members at Bay Section :)

We had our first PDC meeting of 2020 last Sunday, where our goal was to improve on interview and public speaking skills. We first went over interview etiquette and then had each member go through a mock interview round where they were applying to be a committee lead. Through this, members were able to warm up to each other, as well as gain a better understanding of how to conduct themselves in a professional interview, from handshakes and behavior, to the professional way to answer questions and paint yourself in a better light. After this, we went over impromptu tips, and I demonstrated a mock impromptu on the prompt "Describe your perfect assassination plan." It was quite humorous to lighten the mood and give the members a demonstration of what an impromptu should look like. After this, each member received their own impromptu prompt and index cards, and they had 5 minutes to prepare a 2 minute impromptu presentation on the speech. The members impressed me quite a bit, as ...

Over break, a majority of us were traveling, therefore we chose to take a break from having committee meetings. However, we did send out a skills survey before break to ensure that we were focusing on skills that the committee members wanted to learn and improve upon. The top 3 skills that our PDC members want to focus on are: professional speeches, professional communication and networking, and a tie between event organization/interviews/public speaking (screenshot of survey results attached below). Now that break is over, we are planning on sending out a schedule checker to see when our committee is cohesively available to meet, and we will then set a weekly meeting time. We are also planning our first meeting of the year, where we will be working on public speaking skills with a warm up activity to help our committee get to know each other better and become more comfortable around each other. We will then have a bonding event and go out after the meeting to enjoy in a less professi...

Our committee met last Friday, 12/6 to finalize content for the the fall edition of the Homestead Horizon, our Homestead FBLA newsletter. Throughout the week, PDC members engaged in interviews with officers and advisers to get to know them better, as well as have interesting content for other members to read in our newsletter. We spent the week restructuring the newsletter, and we have eliminated a lot of unnecessary content, adding in content such as soft skills (time management and public speaking) and fun facts. We have also formatted the layout to have a lot more pictures to showcase what we are doing in Homestead FBLA visually, allowing the newsletter to be much more engaging for our readers. A very special moment to me, especially, was during our PDC meeting when one of our members, Skyla was reading a story that was going into the Horizon. She is naturally a shy and soft-spoken person, and I wanted to help her break out of her shell. At the meeting, I asked her to energetically...