Reflection: Working With Live-in-Labs

During my time in India last year, I got the chance to talk with students my age who were exploring sustainable solutions towards problems faced by villages in India. Live-in-Labs members have touched the lives of countless residents during the past several years. So I was excited to find out that my peers and I were invited to help with their program’s marketing efforts involving their service-learning program. This program is designed to help students address challenges and come up with innovative solutions that test problem-solving abilities through fieldwork and projects. Live-in-Labs helps students learn first-hand how to give back to the communities while living in the communities themselves. I was very impressed after hearing about all of the projects Live-in-Labs has successfully accomplished, along with their strong efforts to develop a program focused around exposing international youth to issues of rural communities. Working with them showed me how much Live-in-Labs truly cares about the villages in India and how much time students from across the globe devote to coming up with creative and innovative solutions that help teach these communities how to live better lives. I really enjoyed meeting and interacting with the engineering students and getting the chance to learn about all of their projects and how they are formed/implemented. 

My favorite part of the day was hearing about the various marketing ideas everyone came up with. I gained a lot of valuable information from not just my peers, but the engineering students as well. Before going into the meeting, I imagined that there would be no hierarchy, which there surely was not. Everyone’s thoughts and suggestions were just as important as everyone else’s, which made me throw out more ideas! This is important when going through the brainstorming process because sometimes people (especially interns) are afraid to speak their minds. I also liked how the floor was always open to questions. Sharing their lessons from specific projects helped everyone expand their knowledge and learn how to effectively implement new techniques. We left better marketers! We were organized and extremely focused on our goals. My class was given a valuable opportunity to participate in their marketing efforts and be a part of the Live-in-Labs program. I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing the brainstorming process of marketing and I believe I gained a lot of valuable skills that can help me in the future.

Below is a pamphlet idea I created for my presentation to the Amrita students:

Top News Sources

My first choice for receiving news information is Twitter. Every morning, after I wake up, I get dressed and ready for the day. I usually follow this by eating breakfast. While eating breakfast, I like to scroll through Twitter to get a dose of the daily news. Although I use Twitter to get a good laugh and see what my peers are up to, I mostly use it to get an instant look at what is happening in not only the United States but also around the world. I mostly enjoy reading about current events, especially political and weather-related events. Since Twitter has a character limit of 280, these posts are easy to read and provide me with information quickly! My second option for receiving news is Facebook. Even though Facebook is becoming less and less popular among people my age, I like to follow certain news pages that provide interesting articles about current topics today. Sometimes, I enjoy using various news apps that I’ve downloaded on my phone like USA Today and News Break. Sometimes, I even like to look at the apple news app that is pre-downloaded on the iPhone. All these apps are super convenient to have because I’m able to set up notifications and receive alerts on my phone for whenever there is a breaking news story. My least used source for news would have to be television. Although I don’t watch a lot of television at school, when I am home, my parents have it on almost all the time, so I like to watch it with them.

In the second semester of my junior year, I studied abroad through a program called Semester at Sea where most of my time was spent on a boat in the middle of the ocean. While abroad, I didn’t have much access to the internet. The Wi-Fi the ship provided us was very standard and basically only allowed us to receive and send emails. At times, this was frustrating, especially when you are someone like me and like to stay on top of what’s going on in the world. I soon realized that in order to stay informed, I would have to sign up for a news service. I wasn’t looking for anything fancy and didn’t want to pay, so I decided to ask some of my peers on the ship and see if they knew of anything. Once they suggested a free service called theSkimm, I immediately signed up! TheSkimm soon became my favorite part about waking up in the morning. Every business day, sometime before 10:00 AM, I would get an email from theSkimm. I really enjoyed this news source because it broke down difficult topics and put them into fun and simple ways of understanding them. It would prepare me for my day in minutes with the news from back home (United States) and around the world, which was nice because I was traveling all over the world!