Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Senior Thesis Project

I am struggling with ideas about how to integrate my two emphases into a senior thesis. My emphases are Hospitality Management and English. As of now, I'm planning on throwing a sports themed event for underprivileged youth. I'll soon post my ideas for this event, and the reasons why I feel it's necessary. If anybody has ideas about how to integrate my two emphases for a different project, I'd be more than interested to hear them. Thanks.

8 comments:

  1. I work for a company called Youth Health Associates that is responsible for kids is state's custody (DCFS and JSS), all of which are primarily under-age sex offenders. If you need a pool of at-risk youth to choose from, we have 3 male group homes in Clearfield, 1 in Draper, 1 in Cedar City, and a girl's group home in Provo. I work with children in proctor care (which is basically foster care) and these kids are considered less risk to the community than those in the group home.
    There is a great caseworker named Michael Blakey who works out of the DCFS office in Orem and he's does stuff for his kids like organize a running club and a book club. He has had interns in the past help him with his work load so if working closely with a case worker would be helpful, i would recommend him. Maybe you could even just help him boost his running club and reading club (especially since one of your emphases is English). Or host your own 5K race or Dirty Dash or intense obstacle course and/or create your own reading club. Those would be some ideas to get at risk youth involved. And if you need a group of at risk youth, please consider the proctor kids at YHA (because then I could go to your event and have fun AND get paid! haha).

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  2. I am envisioning some hotel with an extensive library in it were visitors can check out a book during there stay.Perhaps you could incorporate the ball kids event at a hotel.Hope this helps you brainstorm for ideas.

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  3. Drew,
    you presented a more complete version of this to the class. I'm assuming you are still working toward that end: an event tied to sports that would benefit some set of at-risk children.

    Since such events require lots of lead time, my first thought would be that you'll need to get cracking! You might, for instance, plan to finish all the planning and solidify all the details and get everything completely ready this semester so that during Capstone 2 you can focus on bringing off the actual event.

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  4. Drew,

    have you started compiling any sort of "role model" examples of similar events that you can use as guidelines to what you want/need to do? Learning from what others have done (and from their mistakes if they're willing to talk to you) can be a beautiful, time-saving, face-saving thing.

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  5. Drew,
    I like the overall concept. Maybe instead of coming up with your own organization, you could help organize and bring together groups that already exist. This could help you by avoiding having to do the ground work and getting on to actually organizing an event and bringing people and fundraising in. I would certainly make connections with people that have or are currently doing something similar because there seem to be a lot of these organizations out there.

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  6. Drew,
    I like your project ideas thus far. You seemed excited about your project when you were presenting it so I would say "keep with it"! The only thing that I listed on your paper as a question was "will you be able to get all of that done?" You had mentioned having people you were considering for motivational speakers, have you begun to consider which companies you would like to attempt to get donations from?

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  7. Drew - I agree with starting up this program for organizations that already exist. If that goes well then create your own. Also - talk to Grant Weaver, he may be willing to work with you with the motivational speaking part.

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  8. Hey Drew, thanks for your positive comment. After reading about your senior thesis, it sounded to me like a youth-motivational experience type of thing, which sounds fantastic! If you are planning on inviting a influential person/people, why not someone like Nick Vujicic for example. Yea I know he is from Australia (you can have someone else), but I guess it'd depend on how much impact you want to bring to the event and the youth.

    Jarry L.

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