Welcome to my
December Newsletter!
Happy holidays to everyone who celebrates! It may seem a little early but I'm already feeling the holiday spirit ❄️ I have so many exciting things to share but first thing's first...
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Let me (re)introduce myself...
I’m a 14 ( almost 15) y/o student studying stem cells at The Knowledge Society (or TKS for short) 🧪 Everyday, I aspire to uncover the secrets of biology and learn something new! I love following my curiosity and enjoy playing music too! |
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My Month at a Glance
Your time's valuable so here's what you're gonna see in this newsletter in the next couple of minutes!
- MIT's Tough Tech Summit & My Takeaways 💻
- What I Learned from Doing 2 Hackathons in 2 Weeks 🗓
- Creating a Recommendation for a Real Company 🦠
- Making My 1st App Prototype 📱
- I Woke Up Everyday at 5 am & I Loved It ⏰
- Media From Cool Creators You Should Check Out 🖥
- December Goals 🎯
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My Takeaways from a Talk by Nest's Co-Founder, Matt Rogers ✍️
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I'm not gonna lie, it took me a while to write an article based on what I learned at MIT's Tough Tech Summit (still can't believe I got to hear from such awesome people, even if it was virtually!!) but I eventually settled on my favourite talk: a fireside chat with Matt Rogers– Co-Founder of Nest & Founder of Incite.org– and Ilan Gur–CEO of Activate.
Check out everything I learned from the role of government in innovation to how to use money to incentivize businesses by clicking below!
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Doing 2 Hackathons in 2 Weeks: Top 5 Things I Learned 🗓
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In my last newsletter, I talked about participating in my 2 first-ever hackathons! But no experience is truly complete until you've reflected on what worked well and what didn't!
Learn alongside me, about everything from how the problem itself can be just as important as the solution to how "why" questions can really ruin a team's dynamics, in my latest article about my top 5 takeaways from these two hackathons 👇
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Working to Solve One of the World's Biggest Problems: The Pandemic 🦠
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This month I also got the mind-bogglingly amazing opportunity to work with PathCheck Foundation, a non-profit working to create health care apps globally to help with the COVID-19 pandemic and future outbreaks in generals.
My team and I were tasked with getting Minnesota to 50% adoption of a completely secure and anonymous digital contact tracing app 📱Klara, Sofi, Sakeenah and I were working on this for over 3 weeks so I'd really love it if you could check out our deck by clicking here or on the button below!
Even though we did some awesome work, there's definitely a lot we could improve on too. Here's where I think we struggled the most with/could improve on...
- There's "Plenty" of Time ⌛️: Struggling with time management is a problem in a lot of team projects but it was especially important for this challenge since it's s a huge project that consulting companies spend months on! We had to do it in 3 weeks but we left almost everything until the very last one.
Note to self: plan, plan, plan + get aligned on a team schedule.
- Team Roles 📋: We had some issues with staying motivated and not knowing who's doing what, so adding team roles and giving each person very specific things to do is critical!
Note to self: assign team roles at the very beginning (and evolve them over time) + check in with people if they're not getting work done
- Back It Up 📊: If you haven't worked on a recommendation before here's one of the biggest secrets– you need actual quantitative data to back up what you're saying. Companies don't make decisions based on what feels right, they let numbers make the decisions.
Note to self: use data to come up with solutions and not the other way around + create surveys/talk to people if you can't find data in a specific area
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Rediscovering My Love of Graphic Design: Making my 1st Prototype 🎨
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If clicking above doesn't work, click here.
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When working on the recommendation for PathCheck, we decided to make our own app prototype to show them what we think would make the most effective app (of course backed up by data!)
I've always loved graphic design but have never dug deep into this interest; but that changed when I tasked myself with building an app prototype in about a day or two with Figma. I like to think I'm a pretty quick learner but Figma definitely has its learning curve 📈 I pushed myself to just go straight into it without any tutorials. (And if I had any questions, I'd just google them). It was such an awesome, rewarding experience.
I'm really proud of the way it turned out so I'd love it if you check out the video above and/or click on the button to play around with the prototype yourself!
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I'm Waking Up at 5am Everyday for a Month ☀️
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This has been such an interesting lifestyle change! I've been doing this as a challenge in TKS with some others and the accountability has been an awesome aspect.
It's sometimes hard (especially when I stay up way too late 💤) but I've loved how it's changed the way I approach different tasks and time! Here are some of the most impactful things waking up at 5am has done for me...
- Fixing My Sleep Schedule 🥱: Before starting this, my sleep schedule was a mess; I stayed up way too late and my waking time was never consistent. Forcing myself to wake up early and consistently though, means having to go to bed early. Otherwise, I can't wake up at 5!
- Prime Productivity Time 💼: I've been able to get some extra work done before going to school and that has really helped kickstart the day. As an example, I finished writing most of my hackathons takeaways article on the very first day of the challenge 🤯 I was really procrastinating on this one but waking up early took away my excuses
- Planning Out the Day 📅: Something else I usually put off because "I didn't have time" was making to-do lists and time boxing. Now waking up early gives me plenty of time to do this and have a nice schedule for the remainder of the day!
The challenge is ending on Dec. 21 but I'm seriously considering keeping up this habit! As I dive deeper into my exploration of stem cells, these extra hours in the morning will become times of amazing wonder 💭
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December's Focuses ☄️
- Dive Deep Into Stem Cells 🧫: I'm doing something called a focus in TKS right now! This is where we dive deep into an area by learning a lot about it, creating a project related to it on our own, and more! I chose stem cells and I can't wait to dive in deeper. Here are some more specific goals...
– Finish up the awesome stem cells Coursera course I’m working on
– Read at least 4 research papers
– Write an in-depth article on my findings
- Talk To Experts 💪: My team and I talked to quite a few amazing experts during the recommendation challenge and it was so so insightful! I want to do the same with stem cell experts so I can build my network and learn from the best!
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That's a Warp & I'll See You in 2021 🎆
Yep, 2020 is almost over! It was the year that somehow felt like it lasted 5 days and 5 years at the same time.
Thanks so much for following along on my innovation journey and watch out because 2021 Parmin's gonna be doing even more fun things 👀
Feel free to reply to this newsletter if you wannna talk, share insights, or give feedback! I'll see you soon in a year that'll (hopefully) be better than the last 🎇
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