Epilogue to the Journey, 안녕!

Via http://qootm.tistory.com/68

안녕!

I would like to thank you for having a nice journey with me for the past 5 weeks.
This time, I have learned a lot about this particular type of writing and communication, 'blog'. Every week, I had fun challenging myself to think hard to decide on topics for my posts and actually take time to write them! Born and raised for my entire life in South Korea before coming to college, I was not 100% sure what 13 to 15 year old American girls would be most interested to read about, but I tried to put myself into the readers' shoes and imagine what I would like to read about at that age.

When it comes to writing, the writer should be conscious of the readers or the audience and the nature of the medium through which the writer is communicating with the readers. For the 'blog writing' genre, I have learned I need to be concise to the point, and make my sentences short and clear. Also, I have learned that posts could become more attractive with visual materials such as video clips, photos with short captions, etc.

Over the course of writing for this blog, I tried to make my posts engaging, personal, and empowering for girls. The following are key messages I would like for you girls to take away from this blog:

• Dream big. 
• Do not be afraid to explore more, experience more, and get out of the comfort zone.
• Do not limit yourselves in any way.
• I believe all of these points should apply not only to travel per se but to 'life.' With a proactive, open-minded attitude, I would like you to throw yourselves into all those great opportunities out there.

Do not forget to dream big, and let possibilities open to you. Make your own bucket list and dreaming about places you would like to go to, career you would like to have, people you would like to meet, or changes you would like to bring to this world. It is fine if you feel you do not yet have enough money, time, or chances to travel abroad or achieve a goal to become a star in a certain industry. Please do not lose heart, and let your passions, your dream open up the paths for you.

In the Korean language, you can say "Hello" and "Bye" between friends with the same expression: 안녕 (An-Nyong). With 안녕, I say bye to you for now, but it is going to be a hello for another amazing journey that awaits you.

안녕!

Love,
Hyuni

Where Has the Time Gone?!

Hello readers!

If you're reading this- then thank you! This project has, in many way, pushed me out of my comfort zone and I appreciate you all reading and supporting us on this journey! Our goal with this project was to make a fun and exciting blog about travel, while seemlessly weaving in empowering messages about female political leaders. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how successful we were in any of those goals. However, I really hope you gained something from this, as I certainly did.

One of the biggest challenges I've faced in writing this blog is understanding YOU, the reader. This may sound trivial, but I struggled with this in many ways. For one, I don't remember nearly well enough what it was like to be a female young adult. When thinking of topics to write about, it was easy to jump to stereotypical assumptions about what all of you (as girls) would like. I challenged myself to go beyond that and ended up basing a lot of my posts based on what I (a not very girly-girl) found interesting. The topics, often related to the outdoors, were intentionally gender neutral in an attempt to not alienate anyone in a readership with a wide range of interests. Again, I don't know if I was at all successful in this attempt.

During this process of understanding the readers, I also ran into the problem of balancing writing about my own beliefs about what is important in empowering young females and considering how some readers may disagree with me on these beliefs. In one blog post I raised a point that was seen by some parents as controversial and age-inappropriate. By discussing this with my class I was able to understand both sides of the argument but ultimately decided to stand up for what I believed in. After all, writing about empowered female leaders for so many weeks had to rub off eventually!

So, I hope you all feel newly inspired both to explore the world and by your own potential to lead it. I wish you the best of luck!

Oh The Great Time I Had

During these past few weeks, I've had so much fun writing for this blog! Not only did I learn to write more concisely, but also more frequently. Before, I thought there was never enough time to write just for fun, but now I know that you can and should make time for the things you love and what better avenue than a blog.

 

Who knows, maybe I'll start a personal blog in the future or at least take up journaling like I said I would for my New Year's resolutions. Lol what better time to start on those than late February! Well, I hope you guys enjoyed reading these posts as much as I enjoyed writing them, so bye for now!

Oh the Things that I Learned!

Writing for this blog has been an interesting and exciting experience for me. I had the unique opportunity to combine two of my passions, travel and politics, while also seeking to empower young girls and inspire them to engage with the world around them. I must admit, this was a challenging task. I learned to write in a crisp and concise way while also working to attract readers and subtly inject politics into seemingly unrelated topics. At times, it felt a bit disjointed, as if I was trying too hard to make the connection between travel and political engagement. However, it also motivated me to think more critically about the world, something I hope my readers observed as well.

I'm not quite sure if we achieved the purpose of this blog--to attract an audience of girls aged 13-15 years old and increase their interest in politics. While there's no way to measure how successful we were, the assignment did prompt me to consider how teenage girls would react to the content I produced. I had to adapt my writing style and adjust how I presented my argument. For me, blogging was a completely new experience, but I found that I really enjoyed it.

I hope that you enjoyed reading this blog as well. Bon voyage!

Via minds.marlboro.edu

Oh the Things I've Discovered!

Hey Ladies!

Wow - what a fun five weeks it has been with you!  I've gone from a novice poster to confident blogger, and I hope that you've enjoyed the ride just as much as I have.  Writing this blog has been exciting, frustrating, and everything in between.  Below are some reflections as I look back over these past five weeks as a travel blogger:

• I've learned to challenge myself in many aspects of my writing.  First and foremost, I have certainly learned to be more clear and concise.  I have also learned to really consider my audience when writing.  That meant adjusting my language, my content, and the format of my posts throughout the term.
• I hope our readers learned that you can do anything that you put your mind to.  Whether they took that away from our posts about empowering women in politics, the fact that we decided to start a blog without previous blogging experience, or even our fluff posts about the places that we've traveled to, I truly hope that our readers know that they can accomplish anything.  
• One of the biggest challenges that I faced was getting discouraged about my posts.  Not knowing if our target audience was reading our blog or even what they were thinking (as I truly don't know a single 13-15 year old girl) was frustrating at many times throughout the term.  However, I tried to put myself in their shoes to the best of my abilities and I hope that paid off. 

And with that, I leave you all with a quote: 

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

-Laozi 

(via http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/travel)

Though traveling the world may seem far away for a teenage girl, traveling is much more than just going to Europe or going on a vacation.  Traveling is a journey, and I encourage all of you to take that single step and begin that journey, wherever that may take you.

Until the next adventure, 

Sarah 

Oh the Takeaways from this Blog!

Hello there!

It's been a fun past five weeks here on this blog!

Here are some of my general takeaways that I learned and struggled with in this project:

• It can be tricky weaving political leadership topics into subjects that are intended to appeal to young teen girls...sometimes I felt like I was forcing core information rather than having it naturally flow.  
• I wasn't sure whether young girls would be more interested in U.S. political leaders, per say, or those of other countries.  I wanted to provide global perspective to link the travel theme to politics, but sometimes it seemed like we were blogging about things just a bit too far away from the daily lives of our audience, whether in terms of location or time period.  
• I struggled with finding a balance between inspiring girls to get out there and travel and feel like they can do anything with potentially disempowering some girls who don't have the means to travel to such exotic locations. I tried to combat this issue by enforcing the message that you don't have to go far away to have great experiences, but I still fear that this topic could isolate girls or cater more to the upper middle class who are able to go to Mexico for spring break, for example.  
• I wanted to inject my own personality and experiences into this blog, but sometimes I feared I was coming across as "that rich girl who gets to go everywhere."  I didn't want to alienate readers by sharing experiences that not everyone can have, so as the term progressed I focused more on other people's travel experiences.  At the same time, though, I think that this resulted in a loss of some of the personality on the blog that could make readers feel connected to the authors.  
•  To go along with the personality attraction (but not make the personality so much about the blogger) I thought about the possibility of making this more of a "Guess who went where?" type of feel so readers would be pulled in by seeing where Taylor Swift went for example, rather than just reading about a location.  I think there is potential to be very successful by weaving in famous personalities which I tried to do in a couple of cases but could probably be done to a greater extent in future blogs.  
• I learned that you have to be very careful to avoid controversial material!  Even if something may seem innocuous, we have to remember that we are part of the "Dartmouth bubble" and that our culture is not representative of the nation at large.  This was a good exercise in helping ground me with the general public and look at matters through a very discerning eye.  I didn't want any law suits for a class project! 

Overall I  had a great time with this project and tried very hard to put myself back in my 13-15-year old mindset!  

-Lindsay 

Sometimes the Best Place to Travel to is Home

While it's super fun to travel to new places, sometimes it's just as nice to go back home. I'm super exhausted from all this schoolwork and just ready to head back for a few days over spring break. Lol I even started making a list of things to do when I'm back in the DC area that you guys might want to try if you're ever down there!

Not only will I be indulging myself in food from places like El Pollo Rico, this amazing Peruvian restaurant in Arlington, but I'll also go shopping in Georgetown. Mostly though, I'm looking forward to catching up with old friends, family, and my adorable little pugs. Ughhh let the countdown to spring break begin...