Project Reflection

    Throughout my EDGE project I really developed communication, troubleshooting, and teamwork skills. Part of my project was recruiting and training counselors for summer camp, and the other part was being an administration member the week of camp. It was a lot of work adjusting to recruitment and training because it happened during the school year with all of my other commitments. The week of camp I learned a lot and very fast because things moved so fast.

    Recruiting and training requires a lot of communication to properly inform people. I explained what it meant to be a counselor, and had to educate counselors in many lessons for camp. This required a lot of emailing and texting which can be difficult on a large scale. The week of camp required a lot of communication for the camp to run. We had around 160 staff members, counselors, and campers that to keep in the loop which was challenging.

Training counselors was difficult because getting over 45 people in the same place at the same time is not easy. Additionally trainings would not always go as planned so I learned very quickly to adapt. Troubleshooting was perhaps the greatest skill to have at camp. No event or activity went as planned, so problem solving was a constant task. As one of the administration members I can say that teamwork to solve problems was very important.

Teamwork wasn’t as important for the recruiting and training portion of my project because I was the only volunteer coordinator. If I had another counselor teamwork would have been very helpful. Teamwork is how our whole camp ran this summer. There were very few tasks that could be completed by one person and it would be foolish to not get help. Camp really helped me to appreciate teamwork and overall helped me to improve as a leader.