Laidlaw LiA Reflection Week 1: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

This week marks the first week of my venture into the LiA program. This week has been filled with a plethora of emotions and experiences as it was such a hectic first week. A lot of things needed to be dealt with both in terms of our logistics here in the States and work-related matters that were unfortunately not fully prepared due to various technical concerns. 

Going into this week, I was initially filled with panic, as in this LiA with the Timothy Smith Network, I am responsible for teaching the Agriculture and food insecurity sections of the Elevating Agricultural Technology program, which consists of agricultural learning, coding and Arduino learning, and 3D modelling, with a scholar responsible for each subtopic. 

The end goal of this program is to equip young minorities in Boston’s ecosystem with the necessary skills to innovate and nurture them to be young entrepreneurs in related fields using critical thinking and communication, whilst also raising their awareness about accessible education and career opportunities. 

My panic in this first week was partially due to being jetlagged after my 26-hour journey from Indonesia, in addition to my teaching section being the beginning of the curriculum, so I had to have my teaching materials ready by the first day. This was an issue as we had some slight radio silence issues before our arrival here, which led to difficulties in finalizing the curriculum and matching our expectations as incoming instructors, the company’s expectations of us, and the student interns’ expectations.

Fortunately, after gathering with my fellow scholars here in Boston, I was immediately comforted, they reassured me that we were all on the same boat, they encountered the same issues and we were all doing our best to man the ship through these big waves. I am grateful that I will be working with these brilliant minds in the coming 5 more weeks and I am truly excited for what’s to come. I am sure that through our experiences not only will we be teaching the students here, but also each other through our day to day interactions facing the challenges which are to come in this LiA.

Furthermore, after teaching started, a few new challenges started to arise, in particular, a challenge for me was the lack of engagement of the students toward the topic I am teaching, agriculture. This was understandable since it is quite a niche subject, but it caught me slightly off guard. This challenge forced me to think creatively and structure my lessons in such a way that it kept them engaged and interested. I am really glad that while facing this challenge, the other scholars were there to help me brainstorm and figure out solutions to keep the class active and engaged. This further motivated me to maximize this opportunity and stage I have been given to share my passion and interest in the agriculture field. I am excited to see how our passion in doing this LiA can impact the students we are teaching in the coming weeks.