So throughout my Capstone, I worked hard with my mentor to run a book club for these kids to give back to them, and the community in general. We hosted them every Wednesday and tried our best to give them a good experience for their hopeful academic and future reading careers. It made me learn how it is to give back to someone through teaching, and reaffirmed the importance of education to me. It also taught me the importance of clarity and organization in understanding the knowledge taught me throughout my education career. Personally though, it made me want to keep giving back with my love for reading to people. I learned that while I may be a bit lazy at times, I like pushing myself to learn more about others and start giving back to the community spending my time on it. I also learned personally that I’m better than I thought I was at communicating professionally and talking to people to help convince them to work with me and give back to others. The results of my project were good as I kept trying my hardest to show the importance of reading and its factor in education and mental health. I believe I did, though maybe there were a few kids I didn’t get my point across to. I offered them to talk to me every Wednesday we met to stay after the book club and ask me questions. I left my email on the google classroom afterwards and told them that they can always email me if they ever need anything. While some kids may not have understood the meaning right away, I really do believe that I came out with my mentor having taught these kids some form of importance in the idea of literacy and they came out understanding that it wasn’t just for me but it was for them as well. She told me that I did good but to be more confident in my ideas since they were good, just needed to be implemented better. I know I came out ready to give back to others and encourage them to succeed in life. Community service just isn’t about getting it done but understanding what you’re getting done. It doesn’t matter the end result but the journey to that end result of how you gave back. If you half-assed it then it doesn’t matter to you and you’ll look back on it with some sort of passive feelings towards it. It’s hard right now to really understand how I feel about all of the community service but as I’m writing this and looking back on these past couple of months I really do feel happy with what I did looking back to those beginning journals. I do feel I did something that matters to me and don’t regret it but I do wonder if these kids did feel like I gave back to them. I did give them a survey but didn’t make it optional though I do know they started to get more comfortable within the book club and started participating as the book meets went on. A specific experience that affected me was when a kid stayed after the meet and talked to me about how she was reading ahead and how she liked reading and a couple of books she liked. It really made me sit back and look on the project and realize what I’m doing is actually affecting people instead of me just thinking it is. It made me feel better about the way I was serving my community and being more confident in it with the way I’ve been presenting it and approaching it. You may not be perfect but you can make it happen in the way you want it to. It felt good, doing it the way I wanted to and running it to help these kids. A particular challenge with Capstone was perhaps getting it done and pushing myself out of the way to do the work in the first place but once I got past the first week, it kept getting easier and easier. If there was one thing I could’ve done differently, it was possibly doing it earlier and pushing myself to network more to find my mentor earlier than I already have. It impacted me in a way that it affirmed to me my love for giving back to people and wanting to keep giving back in the near future. Especially in areas I’m passionate about and do want to give back in the first place. This learning experience made me realize that working on the side to give back to people other than myself would help me keep grounded like Capstone did and enjoy life a lot better. It may be a lot of work based on what you’re doing but from this experience, I’ve learned that it’s worth it and you’ll look backwards on it as something only you could have done, and an amazing thing you can do which you’ll make the best out of if you work hard enough for it.