Interactive Project

Audience/Purpose

The reason why I am starting this is because I was inspired by another Horatio Alger Scholar who did a similar travel vlog except his was published on youtube. I wanted to know what to expect if I ever did go to the National Scholars Conference, and his video was the only one on youtube which allowed you to see what this event is all about. The audience for this project is goal-driven students in high school, regardless of their grade, who are ambitious in their education. These students come from low-income families who have achieved amazing success despite all of the adversaries presented to them in their lives. These students are the ones who will become leaders and philanthropists for education. These are students in high school who are interested in applying to the Horatio Alger scholarship and dream of winning this prestigious nationally recognized award. My purpose for creating this project is to inspire students in high school to apply for Horatio Alger, as they can use this project displaying my experience going to the conference, and see what shoes they can all be in if they apply. I want this project to serve as a guide and capsule in time for what students should expect when they become Horatio Alger Scholars.

Images

The images that I chose are a mixture of images that I have found on Google, pictures from the Horatio Alger Instagram, as well as my own pictures. The reason why I didn't do just my own or Google Images is because I wanted to add different perspectives. For example I wanted to show the beautiful architecture of the Ronald Reagan and Dallas Airport which I could not have done if I had used a picture that I had taken from inside the airport. In addition to this I believe adding pictures of mine like the selfie with the other Scholars that I met from California adds a more personal feel to it which shows that you can make bonds that will last a lifetime in this conference. For starters I chose to put an image of the Horatio Alger logo as a title in order for students to recognize its logo whenever they search up the Horatio Alger application. Next, I decided to start off my first official slide of my trip with a picture of my flight window showing the sunrise in order to emphasize how early I had to get up and begin my journey. Images relating to specific buildings were portrayed by images from Horatio Alger's Instagram as I believe they look the best in terms of highlighting all of the luxurious amenities that were presented. On top of this, they are pictures from this specific year (2022) not from past scholar conferences.

Process

The process itself was quite tedious in terms of trying to pinpoint the exact locations. Something that I found a lot of trouble with was finding the exact places which I visited / where my story took place; I had to learn to work around the constraints of the program. For example, I had to reference the city Alexandria a lot and then from there, I would move the marker to wherever I would see fit. However before I would move the marker, I would consult with Google Maps on my phone looking at where the exact location was to determine where I should pinpoint the location. I referenced the Washington Ronald Reagan Airport as well as “Tidal Basin” as they were noticeably different geographic locations on the map that were present on both maps. It was a bit frustrating not being able to add more than one image to each slide as I feel like just one picture does not do each place justice.

Learning

There were many new skills and tricks that I learned through this project. I think the biggest one was how to work a knight lab story map. I can see myself using this in the future for any meetings regarding a timeline plan or just talking about past experiences. I haven’t seen anybody use this format at a meeting so I feel like this will be a game-changer. Another skill that I learned is how to improve my storytelling skills. A piece of advice that I feel was extremely helpful was when professor Sorapure told me to imagine that I am presenting this in person to somebody. I think shifting my perspective to this allowed me to better express myself as well as convey a more effective story. The last trick that was added to my toolbox was learning how to embed a clickable link to a website with whatever words you want to represent this. My mind was blown when I saw this as I have always wondered how they do this on websites and I finally know how. Overall I feel like this was an excellent project that everyone should try at least once because of how feasible and unique it is.

*parallelism example on "Day 2: Ritz Carlton" explanation:* Here I used parallelism as I said in the final sentence "Remember one small conversation can lead to one giant door being opened," The structure of the two separate clauses is similar as the word "one" is being repeated.