Hello! This is Victoria, the other Team Lead for IHL in the Bay. Tejasvini and I work hand-in-hand to manage all of the projects that our team has going on. If you'd like to check out part 1 of this mini-series, read Tejasvini's blog from last week!
Anyway, back to the topic at hand -- here’s what I do on a typical weekday:
IHL Tasks & School
I tend to be a morning person, so I pretty much always wake up before 7 AM… and it’s totally not because I procrastinate on tasks until the morning. I could have an entire conversation on whether or not pushing off work until the morning in an attempt to idealize my sleep routine is successful, but let’s try to stay on track shall we?
As you might remember from the previous blog, Tejasvini and I rotate tasks every month. This month, I have the slightly easier end of the stick -- I’m in charge of writing our recaps for our weekly meetings, managing the project release calendar, and keeping track of volunteer hours. That being said, I would definitely underline the word slightly. After all, IHL YAC only runs for a bit more than half of the year, meaning that our time to carry out our campaign is limited. This fact floats over our heads at every team meeting, every planned project, and every marketing strategy. Currently, we are also prepping for our next event—stay tuned!—so that is where a great deal of my time is dedicated. If you want some spoilers AHEM a sneak peek, it has something to do with cultural cooking…
At the time I was writing this blog, our event had not been revealed on Instagram yet. Now that you are here, go fill in our Recipe Cookbook ASYNC activity! It gives you 1.5 volunteer hours, AND you’ll get to take part in a super cool project!
Anyway, to continue on with my day, I tend to do most of my administrative work for IHL YAC in the morning, meaning that my team usually receives most of my Slack messages around 7 AM. The fact that I have a time limit (aka school) hanging over my head imbues me with the drive to finish everything within the time period.
Because I don’t have the Slack app on my phone, I am not directly notified every time someone messages me. As a result, I need to systematically check the communication platform at certain times in the day. Typically this entails checking it once
in the morning along with completing other YAC-related tasks, once sometime during the afternoon, and a final time before I go to sleep -- just to make sure I did not miss anything crucial. As for longer periods of YAC-related work time, I tend to schedule it for Friday afternoon, where I can make the meeting slides, work on current projects, and design Instagram posts in one go. It’s become a routine for me at this point, and I am excited to keep co-leading IHL in the Bay for this semester! I can’t believe it has been 3 months already, and I definitely know I will miss my team if/once this campaign ends.
Fun Activities During Meetings
Since I have a bit more time to spare (as well as in terms of the word count ~ Tejasvini’s blog was longer haha), I’ll tell you guys about some wholesome, intriguing, and/or funny instances during this campaign:
Zoom Filters:
If you look through the group pictures that we have of our team, you might notice that we quite often have Zoom filters over us. Essentially, it’s become a routine at this point for us to take a picture at the end of each team meeting with a different filter every time. The most recent one that we took entailed the antlers filter. I noticed that at the beginning, some of our advocates did not have access to filters on Zoom, but as the campaign progressed, I noticed more and more of them being able to join in on the fun. If not, a real-life sticker/mask/prop worked quite well :P
Wordle:
As Omicron overtook the world in the earliest part of 2022, Wordle overtook many high schoolers and their computers (someone always had a Wordle tab open I swear). I was first “exposed” to it in math class, when my teacher had us play it for fun as a warmup, and it eventually progressed to me seeing so many people play it every day. Anyway, as I was wrapping up one of our team meetings for IHL in the Bay, I casually brought up the infectious case of Wordle to the team, and someone challenged me to play it on the spot. And so I closed the presentation slides that I was screen sharing and proceeded to open up another tab to play that day’s Wordle. Needless to say, I definitely liked the collaboration aspect of it -- having multiple minds work on it at once and suggest possible words was far more rewarding than me wracking my two brain cells in an attempt to guess the word… in six tries. Since then, we’ve always played or brought up Wordle at most of our meetings. And one more thing, Kimberly is a queen at Wordle. Now that that’s out of the way, I have to say, IHL in the Bay holds a special place in the part of my brain that is dedicated to Wordle… or vice versa :)
I would write more about our meetings and team-bonding experience (ie. how meetings always run overtime, presentation memes, and me seeing Janaki EVERYWHERE), but I have to wrap it up here -- I got math homework and a very berry important speech to work on for English (pray for my grade :D). For now, farewell, and I hope to see you participating in our asynchronous activity, the IHL ASYNC Recipe Cookbook Lesson!