Maria K Magana
Final Project Paper
My name is Maria Magana, and this is my first time doing this kind of project that involves people from other parts of the world, and where there was no known person, I mean a member of my class. The activities we had to do were entirely new for me, but at the same time exciting.
In the group meeting we had weekly, we talked about topics all members were interested and based on that, we give several ideas of questions for the interviews, and then we voted on one. I was happy that the topic and questions for the interview were related to psychology. The topic we choose was mental health and the first question was “how mental health affects students”. After we decided on our first question, we had the work of looking for two members that accept to participate in the interview. It was a little difficult for me to find an appropriate person for the interviews. First, because of the language. As a Mexican person, I know a lot of people, but the majority speak Spanish and they don’t meet the requirement to participate in the interview.
The second inconvenience I had was finding people who are or were students that can share their own experiences as students and the challenges they could live within their mental health. After all the inconveniences, I find two adequate students that accepted to help me with my interview. In one of the interviews, I can’t be present when she responds to the question. But I talk with her about the question, and she finds interesting the topic and the question. She told me that she can say a lot about the topic due to the difficulty of being a good student and having good mental health. When I receive her video, we talked again about her response and her comment was “it was somewhat deliberate to talk about this topic and tell others about my experience.” For the second person, I was present, and I recorded her. I had the opportunity to ask the question, put play, and listen to her answer while recording the video. I enjoy the way she was involved and how she talked about their concern with their classes, her work, and how she managed her mental health.
On the other hand, in the second set of interviews, we had to interview the same people, it was a second question related to the same topic of mental health. I had one inconvenience that make me stressed a little bit. One of the persons I interview has a family emergency that made her absent from school and disappear for several weeks so I couldn’t contact her for the second question. I was afraid and stress that it affected my performance in the program because I really liked it and enjoyed it, and I was having a good run by having perfect attendance. So, I decided to contact the Soliya team to ask about changing of person and doing the two sets of questions and they agreed about that. They were understanding and told me that there was no problem with that. The next step I did was to look for another member to make the two interviews. I contacted an older friend that I had in one of my Spanish classes, and he sent me the two videos I needed to complete my set of interviews. The second question we as the group decided to ask in the interview is “What do you do to improve your mental health”. It was a great question for the interviewers because they share what they do to improve their mental health according to their experiences that were the previous share in the first interview.
In my group was a lot of diversity, and the point of view of each one helped us to find a topic that interested us all. Although there were people from different parts of the world and our way of thinking varied, we all agreed when talking about issues that affect our society. In this way, we were able to find a topic that involves everyone regardless of culture or place of residence, and since we are all students, we find in common all the difficulties that we usually have at some point in our education. All this encompasses the topic of mental health, and that is how we found the perfect topic and questions to do our interviews.
Our question helped our community because as previously mentioned mental health is something that affects students. When we talked in our session about these interviews, we discussed what those who were interviewed said in their own way like how stress, depression, and school anxiety affect us. Likewise, the advice they gave in the second interview about what they do to improve their mental health was interesting, and I think that these tips help more than one of us to put them into practice. Sharing our points of view in the sessions was interesting and useful. It is always welcome to learn from other cultures and from other people’s way of thinking and the way they see things from their perspectives. We tend to think that people think the opposite of us due to their culture and the part where they are born, but the reality is that when comparing points of view on specific issues, we notice that it is not the case, that for the most part thoughts tend to be similar when it is about global issues like the one, we discussed and decided for our project “mental health”.
Now, speaking from my experience in this program, I can say that it was a great experience that I enjoyed, learned, lived with, and met different people. It was a change of thoughts when I listened to my groupmates what they thought and how they saw things. It was very interesting because sometimes a topic would lead to a whole dialogue to discuss our cultures. although there were some challenges personally that I had to go through in order to fully participate in this program. The first challenge I had to go through was my hearing impairment. Before starting this program, I was very nervous because I didn’t know how this program could serve me because of my hearing impairment and because this program was about a lot of participation. Thanks to my teacher and the DLDRC program to which I belong at my university, I was able to have all the necessary accommodations so that I could be comfortable and could belong to the group. I had a transcriber and through that, I was able to understand and follow the conversation of my group. Also, thanks to Daniel, the coach of my group who helped me a lot by putting the questions to discuss in the chat as well as relevant information about the course and his availability to read my answers and comments since due to my hearing problem my way of communicating is something difficult to understand. the other challenge I had was due to my dual nationality. I am Mexican, my roots are Mexican and most of my thoughts are based on Mexican culture sometimes it was difficult for me because I had to answer according to American culture and what I learn at my university. It was a bit difficult, but I liked sharing a bit because there were two others who were connected from the United States so I could from time to time respond as a Mexican.
In short, this project left me with a lot. I met new people, and I learned different perspectives on the same subject. I found people who think the same way as me, and I learned from those who thought differently from me. It was like learning the same subject from another angle, and it was something that I really appreciate, and that I really liked about this program.