This year, one of the clubs I decided to join was The Red Cross Club at OSU. During high school, my school would have two big blood drives that I would help organize. Every time we had a drive, I had a lot of fun planning them and running them. I thought it would be fun to help out blood drives still at OSU. I learned about this huge event called Blood Battle. It is a month long fight during November between Ohio State and Michigan to see who can get more blood donations. My job last week was to recruit before blood battle began. I did not think this would be hard, but I was met with much resistance. Back in my high school, people would line up just to have the chance to sign up; everyone wanted to skip class and help out the drive. I knew that people wouldn’t want to skip class, but I thought that people would rally behind the cause, beating Michigan, and free food. Sadly, it was not that easy here.

I was scheduled to recruit for an hour on Monday and Wednesday before Blood Battle began. I went in excited and ready to get donors for our first big drive. I stood in the oval asking everyone passing by if they would like to sign up to donate blood. I was met with no after no after no. This began to take a toll on my excitement, and I became disappointed and demoralized. I was starting to give up. I decided to ask one more person before I threw in the towel. With my final attempt, I got my first yes. Finally, after 30 minutes, I had someone sign up and I felt exhilarated. When I got her sign up, I realized that I shouldn’t let people not signing up bring me down. Instead, I should appreciate small wins.

This year, I decided to reach out to the swim team to see if I could volunteer my time to do their statistics. Much to my surprise, I was embraced by the team with open arms. The first day, I was given four big assignments. I had to make a goal time calculator for both men’s and women’s team. I also had to calculate the points each Big Ten team got at championships earlier this year.

This project has already taught me a rather unpleasant side of data analytics. I thought these projects would only take up to maybe three days. I was not prepared for the amount of data I would have to  work with. When I got to work at the Cleveland Clinic, the data set I was using was already typed up, and I just had to import it. Plugging in the top fifty times with two to thirty-six pieces of data for each person for fourteen races took at least a week for each goal time calculator.

My goal for this year is to continue working with the swim team. If this year continues being a good experience for me, I hope to carry this over to next year as well. These projects with the swim team has already taught me so much and is helping me possibly obtain an internship over the summer.