Have you ever felt that you’ve let people walk all over you, acted too selfless around your friends, or just taken a little bit too much to heart? If so, I can relate 100 percent. It’s not really unusual for someone to act like that. Tolerance, altruisticness, and pensiveness are all a part of human character, especially mine. Although I may often tend to have a low self-esteem, I wouldn’t dare to miss a goal I set for myself, let my friends down, or let my thoughts get into the way of doing something I love.

Open for Options:

As I play Ultimate Frisbee and run for Cross Country, Part of my job is to be a team player. Apart from encouraging other players to do the very best they can and giving players advice for future meets, being a team player also means developing tolerance while listening to other people’s opinions, no matter how much they contradict with what I have to say, or how much I disagree. It’s important to admit that you don’t know all of the answers than to claim that you do when you really don’t. Not only are you lying, but you are also taking the risk of decreasing your reputation.

Contribution to my Community:

Apart from sports, I also participate in a few other extracurricular activities, such as an Improv club at my school, where we encourage each other to be creative was we play games and perform skits off the top of our heads. Outside of school, I work as the Graphic Designer for UrbEd, an organization that aims for a quality and efficient urban education for all. Being very motivated to do good for my community makes me altruistic. I’m selfless and I love to bring people together to do a world of good. I wouldn’t refuse any offer to help others in need.   

A Pensive Personality:

I’m also a thinker, especially when it comes to work and social life. Never do I submit any writing assignment or essay without putting a huge amount of thought into it, making sure the vocabulary and structure are what I planned for it to be, and then proofreading it afterward. I’m not the type of person to always start the conversation, but I always love to be a part of one. Me being a thinker means that I may recite things in my head before I write it down (so I won’t have to erase), or say it out loud.

Though sometimes my selflessness could be too much for other people, I’d hate to let someone down. I am in SLA Digital Video CTE, and in that class, we do a lot of group work when it comes to making our own videos. Being a thinker means I really consider how the audience is going to see our product. I really want to make sure that everything is planned out carefully before we start filming. Being tolerant means I don’t reject any ideas from anyone else. I would rather build off of them. One we settle on an idea, I’ll do whatever I can to bring that idea to life. It would then be unlikely for me to substitute something in for my own idea, because of how that would make me selfish. All of these personality traits make me into the person I am now.

A lot has happened since I first looked into this issue.

Back when I was writing my first blog post for my You and The World issue, I was listing a lot of other statistics on general teen sleep. I have mentioned how other disorders (such as depression and anxiety) could lead to insomnia. I have also written about sleep apnea and its own causes (such as obesity) and its cures. I’ve been considering my plan of original research as I was writing it.

I put that plan into action soon before I wrote my second blog post. I summarized the survey and how that plan didn’t work out (questions were more about sleep than disorders), and what four people said when I interviewed each of them (Three had insomnia, one had sleep apnea; that’s the plan that did work out). Those four interviews have let me know more of what it’s like to actually have one of the two disorders. At the very end of my second post, while considering a second plan, I said : “Whatever I think of in this moment, I’m probably going to change my mind later”. I was right about that.

When I first glanced at this part of the project, I considered raising money to push towards medicine for insomnia and sleep apnea (and contacting Penn Sleep Medicine first), But realization came across. Only doctors can prescribe medicine. It didn’t take me too long to think of a different idea. Recent data suggests that these sleep disorders are gradually starting to get recognized, and a lot of Sleep Clinics are still studying the brain. I can’t create medicine on my own, but I wanted to at least help spread the word.

I have created a website called SleepWell! It’s meant to raise awareness for medication for insomnia, sleep apnea and many more. I felt that it would be easy for people to see and view a website (once I promote it well enough through via advertisements around the school) since people are on the internet all the time. The website summarizes what needs to be known about insomnia, sleep apnea, and a few more common sleep disorders, with statistics and symptoms found from a variety of Sleep Meds and other trustable sources.

Here’s what the introduction looks like.

Here’s what the insomnia statistics look like.

I have also taken quotes from Alaska Sleep Clinic and Sleep Med of Santa Barbara, since they are both professionals that know a lot about most of those disorders. For every one of those disorders, there is a description that comes with treatment/cures (if any). If i didn’t create this one page, this website wouldn’t have been as helpful. Writing only about insomnia and sleep apnea seems more like an article with its own URL than a whole new website.

Since the website was finalized on Wednesday, May 16th, I’ve been working on ways to publicize it. Venngage lets me create flyers, print them out, and publish them to another world on the internet, so I’m sure I’ll be using that to get the word out. People also have suggested for me to advertise it on medical forums, and I am currently looking for some good ones.

It took me nearly a month to work on this website, and I’m still not done the project. If anything could have been done better, it would be time management, and that way I could have added things such as more visuals for the eight other sleep disorders (diagrams, pie charts, etc.), or I could have worked more on what the advertisement looks like and says.  I honestly don’t think that the job is complete until everyone is able to see what I’ve done, and I know I haven’t reached that point yet. There is still much left to do, and I’m willing to continue.

My annotated bibliography is right here.

In my first blog post for the You and The World project, I have completed a lot of research on sleep disorders, specifically in teenagers. I mentioned insomnia, sleep apnea, and other causes of a lack of sleep. I have listed statistics for both disorders, and I have closed out with an original research plan.

Since my first blog post on the topic of sleep disorders, I’ve had a plan for the original research. I’ve researched a lot, and now it’s time go deeper into it.

My first original research plan was to put a survey in an advisory memo (you can take it if you want, it doesn’t matter anymore), or just send it to every freshman if possible. Most of the questions were about normal sleep, and there were some diverse answers from the few people I sent it to.

Statistics for lack of sleep from students and reasons for it, according to an article on The Tartan.

My visual consists of a handful of art materials scattered across a table. The materials include pencils, value pencils, crayons, compasses, pencil sharpeners, and paintbrushes put into a mixture of warm and cool colors. Bigger objects, like the crayon box and the journal, bleed off the edge, since you don’t necessarily need to pay attention to those things. As you may know, this is a remake with its design based on the criticisms I recieved. It still has the same format: materials scattered all of the art materials around the paper as is if the piece of paper was a final art piece.     

       I still didn’t use as much reference for this slide.  I reordered the materials as I remixed the visual. The first critique I had was the color of the ‘table’. Before I remixed it it was a light shade of blue, but the brown color adds to a realistic style. I also stood up the cup of paint, since the color of the paint bristles were blending in too much with the paint color, because they were touching. The normal pencils still have two locations in this setup; one is still on the journal, and three others are still towards the lower right corner. There’s definitely a lot of more value, too, on nearly every object, and this also adds more to this realistic style.

My visual kept the same center piece. The incredibly crappy looking pencil drawing of a rocket and another planet is still there. I didn’t want this visual just to say “so yeah, this is me”. A moral or message is my way of making sure people can really take something out of the artwork. The one I decided to stick with is “what you allow is what will continue”. It’s simple and self-explanatory, unlike “I am within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life”. I split the moral into two and then put one half on each side, since I didn’t want it to interfere with the visual. So, after considering the message, I was pretty much done.