Trust the Process

         Looking back on a time where I applied a big chunk of my time and energy towards a certain event, was during my time as Senior Vice President in high school. In this position, one of my jobs was to be in charge of the senior section at every rally. It was a competition amongst all other grade levels, and being in charge of the senior section was the biggest task to take on because everyone at the school expects you to be on top. In order to win, our section had to be completely over-the-top.

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          I can say wholeheartedly that I devoted myself to this job, and did everything in my power to ensure we won this competition. I had an amazing committee to help with posters during monthly meetings, but to ensure they all looked presentable, I pre-measured all of the space we needed to fill and came up with all poster ideas to be themed to each rally. I also did things that have never been done before in the history of our high school. For example, taking advantage of the poles on the gymnasium ceiling to suspend gigantic posters. For the space-themed rally, I even painted big light-up lanterns to look like planets and they glowed at the top of our section. I always devoted a lot of time to painting elaborate backboards so the students would have an opportunity to pose and take photos with their friends for memories and social media. These wow factors surely posed challenges during setup, as it was quite difficult to reach all the way up towards the ceiling. After realizing how much effort it took, I started devoting a team of five students to purely focus on this one task during the entire setup, and the last two rally set-ups ran a lot smoother through this delegation of tasks.

 

          All of these moving elements took weeks of working hours upon hours in my garage after school and on weekends. Ensuring everything would be ready in time for the 4 AM wake-up call the morning of the rally. Organization was key in this process, and the night before I would pack everything in sections in my garage for committee members to pick up in their cars and bring to school in the morning. All of this preparation paid off, as each setup went smoothly and we always finished with an ample amount of time left before the actual event start time.

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         To measure what section won each rally, our principal would judge the appearance of each section and the loudness of the students during the “class yell”. We had three rallies each year, and WE WON EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Being able to look back at the photos of all the people having so much fun in our section brings me so much happiness when thinking about all the time and effort I devoted to these events and seeing the work actually pay off in the end.