- List ten things that make you feel human.
- Eating and liking different food than other people
- Being exhausted after a long day
- Being sore after a tough workout
- The satisfaction of finishing something (a project, a race, a task)
- Discovering a connection with another person
- Caring about things that otherwise have no effect on my life
- Making music
- An answer to a question popping into my head hours after the question is posed
- Dreaming
- Gaining an understanding of difficult concepts
- Articulate your philosophy of engagement as it pertains to your work with the GSIF / LVSIF. Specifically discuss: (1) Why should I engage? (2) How must I engage? (3) With whom must I engage? (4) What kinds of challenges, opportunities, and approaches should I care about? (5) What might my epitaph read?
My engagement is based upon the potential positive effect that I can have on a very large number of lives. This leads into why I engage. I feel as though this program along with my own personal goals align in a way that let me see how much impact I can have immediately. This venture is set out to help solve an issue that can improve the lives of many people. I think the methodology for any kind of engagement must have a few basic features. Engagement should be respectful, responsible, well researched, and done with as open a mind as each individual can muster. The with whom I engage comes from more the project I joined than my own personal choice. Although it is not misaligned from demographics I may have chosen personally, this project chose to work with newborns in Sierra Leone due to it being a place of high prevalence and low diagnosis of sickle cell disease. It is a very good candidate for being a jumping off point in the expansion of this venture. I think that any challenge, opportunity, or approach that may make a change to the product or venture’s effectiveness is important to consider. Right now the primary objective of this venture is to increase the effectiveness of the test strip. This challenge requires a lot of consideration and work in the lab and must be tended to because it is currently a barrier to our success. Further, opportunities or alternative approaches should be considered if they have the potential to increase a venture’s impact while maintaining the same goals/morals that the project already had established. This is assuming that the project’s backbone is sound and does not require a great change to make it effective. Although I am not sure what kind of post-death procedure I will want to have done, I think it will likely be a cremation. In that case I will likely not have a physical tombstone and epitaph, however I have a few ideas for what I would like to be on a potential epitaph in my memory. It would likely reflect something that I value or my sarcastic personality. It may be something simple like “Aiden McCurley, Remember me as I was”.