Blog #2 Elections Matter Melissa Santos

 

Hello everyone!

My name is Melissa Santos, and I was one of the dedicated members of Group 4 in our project, titled Elections Matter. For this assignment, our wonderful professor provided us, as a class, with four carefully considered and balanced options. These options allowed us to explore diverse topics, encouraging us to share our public perspectives and to craft well-researched presentations.

As a class, we had the opportunity to decide on one of these options and research deeply into it, examining its importance and impact. Through this process, each group in the class collaborated to create a meaningful and informative presentation that would contribute to a further understanding of the given subject.

Each group did an excellent job in giving an extraordinary perspective on different issues or topics that need to be addressed while presenting in an eye-catching way. I was extremely impressed by how they all organized their PowerPoint presentations based on the topic they had been doing research on. I particularly liked how everyone’s brochure turned out as it highlighted the most vital information from their presentations in a brief, but relevant way.

Thank you all for your attention and support as I reflect on the presentations given by sharing my thoughts and experience with you today in this blog post!

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Let’s begin!

The subjects presented consisted of the following: Gender Equality, Education Policies, Immigration Policies, and finally the Electorate and the Election Process.

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My group and I decided to focus on gender equality. We began by planning out our approach as a team. Together we outlined our objectives and decided on what we wanted to cover. To ensure fair participation during this project, we distributed specific roles and responsibilities for each member of the group to contribute to.

We then proceeded in designing our PowerPoint presentations and deciding on the number of slides that would be needed to give an informative and organized presentation. From the beginning, our top priority in this project was to deliver a presentation that would not only inform our classmates as well as our professor, but also provide an entertaining and pleasing perspective that could also educate.

I believe we worked quite well together as a whole. Throughout the presentation I quickly noticed how we support each other when presenting. We each provided assistance to the speaker if it was ever needed. We also transitioned from one topic to the other smoothly avoiding an unorganized performance, thanks to our timely input in finalizing our project before presenting. Each member added extra information to their speech, which significantly enhanced the quality of our project.

Thanks to our professor Sinkoff we have all, as a class, developed a more qualified approach in preparing and delivering a speech, whether it is for something small or for something great.

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Education Policies

To review the first presentation given on education policies, I will begin by applauding them on their hard work. I significantly enjoyed listening to how education has changed throughout the years. I believe education policy is a particularly important topic that should be addressed as it not only affects us already here, but also the children of the future. 

I paid close attention to the opinions they provided from teachers. I found their statement on the impact of students’ academic and social skills being caused by the global pandemic we had in 2019, also known as, Covid 19, interesting. I agree with this statement as I experienced it myself throughout my last year of middle school up until my sophomore year in high school. I believe the pandemic genuinely made me develop laziness on a completely unacceptable level. I lost my valuable study skills and social skills throughout the year, which made it a challenge to make friends and maintain good grades. I really enjoyed this group’s presentation as it was well-coordinated and informative. I can openly say it was one of my favorites, I felt like I learned something new with every passing slide.

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Immigration Policies

Next, I would like to reflect on the second group’s presentation which was made around the topic of immigration policies. I also enjoyed watching this presentation, it was organized and well-put together. Their brochure consisted of mainly the similarities and differences of how Donald Trump and Kamala Harris plan to make a change. I can tell the group put in maximum effort to obtain the most accurate and updated information as we were able to clearly see not only their brochure but also their presentation. 

Under the heading Trump’s impact on immigration in the brochure, they added how “Trump has consistently advocated for strict immigration policies” which include proceeding on the construction of the Mexican border. This idea can be remembered from a promise he made during his first presidency. Whereas, provided in the brochure under the heading Harris’ impact on immigration, there is an assumption that Kamala Harris is more likely to “take a more compassionate and reform-oriented approach to immigration”, I find these different perspectives really intriguing as we are in our election year, which greatly impacts us, the people. I think overall this group did a good job providing information on both parties in a respectable way.

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Electorate and Election Process

The last group I will be reflecting on will be the Electorate and Election Process. I found this presentation informative. It is important for everyone to understand how changes and decisions are made in the government. They provided meaningful information like how the processes work, their history, why our votes as a population are important and more. 

They provided a timeline of the History of Voting in their brochure which makes it simple to see how voting has developed over the years. They also provided insight into the accident that occurred in 2000 during the presidential election between Bush and Gore. Back then, there was confusion with the ballot machines which meddled with the vote counts for the candidates. This, as the group already shared, showed us how voting needed to improve. Overall, I found this presentation organized and well thought out. I enjoyed learning about voting history and how it evolved over the years.

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Thank You!

That concludes my blog post. I really appreciated this assignment as I feel sometimes classes don’t pull you out of your comfort zone to speak about a topic you might not be familiar with. During this class I learned to speak publicly in a way I was not capable of doing before. Thank you very much for joining me in my reflection and viewpoints on my class’s presentations.