This week we had our first group meeting. During the meeting, we easily built rapport! The basis of that was our common passion for education issues and social impact and an unfortunate series of events that led to us dropping a team-mate. Having to decide the fate of a team-mate even before meeting together proper was stressful for all of us. We really did not want to hurt this person’s feelings but we felt that dropping him would be best for the team. This hard decision was the first decision we made and I think it solidified us as a team. After all, common experiences and common struggles are what bind a team together.

Having overcome that obstacle we quickly got to work. Firstly, we planned out our team schedule for the semester, including both class deadlines and group deadlines into our calendar. Examples of group deadlines included a deadline for completing research and identifying a problem area and a deadline for coming up with a detailed solution to address our chosen problem. During the meeting, we also identified problems areas in the education sector and brainstormed some possible solutions. We came to the conclusion that a lot of the problems we identified were highly relevant to America and the neighborhoods we grew up in but not necessarily relevant to India and Vizak. Therefore, we came to a collective decision that we needed to get in touch with experts on India, Vizak and education related problems in India and collect more primary research to supplement our general knowledge. We needed to understand the typical Vizak smart phone user and common educational problems faced in Vizak.

We left the meeting having allocated each team member 5 organizations/individuals to contact. The research collected would then be presented at the next meeting.

The Education and Entertainment Group

Itzel Martinez, Arshad Ali Abdul, Divya Suri, Julio Dominguez, Rosie Serrato