If I say “that guy’s crazy,” what do you think that means? Most likely, you’re thinking about the mad kind of crazy with smashing things and all that, but the kind of crazy I’m talking about is the one that geniuses get called, the kind that innovators get called, the kind that people say when something life-changing happens, and that kind of crazy is what we had to learn about on our latest project “cray cray yay yay”.

To be more specific, our driving question for this project was “why does it take a crazy person to change the world?” To craft an answer to that question, we did a ton of things, my favorite of which was a field study to Seattle, which I’ll get into a bit more later on in this post. The final product in the project was creating a PechaKucha and presenting it to the families and friends of PLP 10. A PechaKucha is a presentation format in which there are 20 slides, and each slide is on the screen for 20 seconds, no matter what. For the sake of all the viewers, all the students were grouped up into groups of three or four and assigned a topic to focus on. My topic was “philanthropy redefining giving,” which in short was asking how philanthropy and the world have been impacted by the choices of crazy people.

Once our class got our topics, we got to go to Seattle with the goal of taking all the craziness Seattle has to offer and putting it into our presentation. In Seattle, my group chose three main things to focus on:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and how its crazy philanthropy is changing the world as we know it.Paul Allen and how he captivates people to learn with his style of philanthropy.The Climate Pledge Arena and how its bold philanthropic ventures are shaping future and present companies.There was so much to see in Seattle, and the craziest part was that it was all useful to everyone even where we ate could’ve been turned into a presentation which answers the driving question.

But then the evening came March 14th the Presentation night. After a few hours went by it was finally my groups turn to get up on the stage and present. And for me at least i was pretty nervous but once i got up there i was in the zone i only had one small hiccup but i was really happy with how i did and how my group did.

But how was my experience in the final stages of this project? I think because I embraced the fact that I was a bit nervous, it helped me take the time to really practice my lines to the point where I was really confident and wasn’t too worried anymore. But I still think my group as a whole should’ve practiced more because our flow as a group wasn’t 100%. A bit more practice would’ve helped us, but I was still happy with how it came out. My group took a long time to finish our script and slides, but I think it was worth it to get the quality that we ended up with. I was really happy with how my group was really good at working together and helping with things others were worse at. One experience I didn’t expect to have for the PechaKucha night was being someone who helped with the introduction speech and introducing the first group. But it was really fun, and I’ll probably do it again if I get the chance.

I want to specifically thank my group members Gwenyth and Magnus for being so helpful and keeping me in check throughout the project. Please go and check out their blogs!

Thanks for reading. I hope you have a good day or evening.