Blog Post #1

I enrolled in this course because I thought it would be a great chance to learn to make an actual impact. I have always been interested in making a visible impact in education and while the project I will be working on does not focus on education I will gain important skills that will benefit my future goals. While working on this project I hope to find new interests and explore other ways that an impact can be made. Another reason I enrolled in this course was to meet people who were also driven to make an impact on the world around them from such a young age. When I was in high school and I shared my future goals the people around me would tell me my goal was too big and could not be accomplished but when I arrived at Lehigh I met people who had goals similar in their impact and their reasoning. When I learned about the Global Social Impact Fellows program I knew that I wanted to be a part of the program. This program brings people who share a common goal together to accomplish it and I wanted to be a part of the process of making an impact for the lives of others. 

I believe that this course will make me a better cognitive science student because I will be able to explore, research, and emerge myself in a different culture. Emerging myself in a culture that I know little about will allow me to explore the reasons behind why some of their cultural norms are not norms for us back home. As a cognitive science student I learn about the reason behind why humans do the things they do. Using my knowledge from my lectures and the knowledge I will gain from being on the field and working inside of that culture will make me more intuitive and also change the way that I view my own culture when it is compared to the cultures of others. I am also an international relations minor and I believe that traveling to the philippines will allow me to see how they react to people who come from a different country and I could make inferences from prior knowledge as to why they react to foreigners in a certain way or why they treat them a certain way.  

There are many factors that could affect the developing country’s access to eyeglasses such as education, jobs and volunteer work. As a future educator I believe that a proper education could have a major effect on many world problems. Students in optometry school could set up programs where they go to Kenya and perform eye exams on people who need them there and this could benefit both the students with experience and the residents of developing countries with better eye health. This experience could be treated like a study abroad opportunity and could be funded by either the schools of optometry or established optometrists that feel passionate about their job and passionate about everyone having access to eye exams and eyeglasses. Another educational aspect is that if more children in developing countries were given the opportunity to go to a school where they could get a quality education and be supported to continue their education through college, they could become members of an improving society. If a child from Kenya was given quality education they could potentially become optometrists and give back to the community that they come from. While the chances of every child in Kenya becoming an optometrist are very slim, these children would have a decent job because of their education and that job could potentially offer them a way to get eyeglasses for them and for their families. If the job does not offer them eyeglasses directly they could also use their salary to afford eyeglasses or could travel to where they can obtain them. Back home in Chicago, many people also have trouble accessing eyeglasses for themselves and their families. If your child attends a Chicago Public School, kindergarten through twelfth grade, then once a year they are eligible for a free vision test and a pair of glasses if needed and this program is made possible by doctors who volunteer their time to the Chicago Public Schools. If optometrists would volunteer more of their time to helping their communities then this could also be a program that could be set up in developing countries to at least give children access to free eye exams and eyeglasses.

 

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