Project Reflection

  The first project we were given In American History was one which we looked at immigration to the U.S causes over many decades.We broke off into groups of 3 and studied the decades 1830 to 2000. I was assigned the years 1890-1940 and already had a pretty basic idea as to why people would move to America during this time.I knew that the Holocaust would be a big factor but one thing that shocked me was the Russians who were escaping religious persecution in the Soviet Union. This event really surprised me because the targeted group was Christians. Prior to this project I thought that Christianity was the top religion therefore people couldn’t be persecuted if they were Christian. At this time period Atheism was the doctrine of the Soviet Union. This really changed my view on how people approach religion.  

The last two decades (1990-2000) the highest number of immigrants moved to America. Based on that trend I can predict that factors going on in current world news would cause many people to immigrate to America. For instance, I am aware of the problems in the middle east, so maybe those factors will contribute to an increase of immigration.

 Working on this project showed how we have grown since 9th grade. I was expecting certain people to procrastinate or not give their all. I was surprisingly shocked at how easy it was to get in contact with my group members and how we all cooperated with each other.I think we all stepped our game up knowing that the 11 grade year would be particularly hard.
 Once we gathered enough research it was hard to figure out how to present our work without repeating too much of what other groups would say or putting our audience to sleep. We had a lot of information and very little time and space to match. We didn’t want to put a chart up and read off it because no one wants to look at charts after doing a whole project on spreadsheets  and probably organizing their own work in charts. The idea of using a prezi was brought up by me because I remember watching a prezi presentation over the summer. As an audience member I liked how everything was animated and it almost felt more like a very interesting TED talk, rather than a high school keynote presentation. Looking back, I feel like we choose wisely because we were the only ones in the class who did a prezi which makes us stand out. We really just wanted to be remembered because everyone was going to present that same information and when people reflected on this project we wanted to be one of the groups they would bring up.


 I do regret not remembering all the information we were suppose to relay verbally to to the class. Once we began to present it was as though we all forgot the valuable details we meant to say. However, I feel as though our basic ideas were grasped by the class because it was all around the same research that everyone else did. So, if I could do anything differently it would have been to give more details during the presentation as if we were presenting to an audience who didn’t do this project.  

 Once we were first introduced to the immigration project it was hard to picture what our final work would look like and how we would even go about this long journey of research we had ahead of us. Now that we were able to successfully tackle not understanding a project to actually finishing it, the bar for all our other work is set higher. I feel like once I have completed something I didn’t think I could, any other thing should become easier to handle.  

With that said I am excited about any other challenging work we will have in the future and how I am able to confidently start something when I have no idea what my outcome would be.



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