My Reflection

My Students’ Sentence: “He made me confident about the outdoors”.

This is what I want the students to conclude after the camping trip. I want each student to gain enough knowledge and skills to lead their own expedition in the outdoors.

Was I better today than I was Yesterday?

In August, I didn’t have a clue of what I wanted to do. I had different ideas, but none of them seem to express my passion. I was walking through a foggy open field. I didn’t know where I was going with my project and fell behind everyone else. I became tired of walking through this field, and decided to find a way out. I began to think of my passions; I began to think of something I would love to share with others.

I started to ruminate about my past camping experiences, and realized all of the challenges and fun I experienced. This was when I realized that I could share my experience and knowledge with others. This idea was just the thing I was looking for.

I concluded that I was going to lead a camping group in which the students will learn basic leadership and survival skills. Currently, I’m in the process of gathering information needed to begin this camping trip, but I’m a mile stone ahead than I was in August.

Where? Where? Where!

I have talked to Stephen Verla about where I could make my project happen. At first I picked a location that was a long drive from the school, but Stephen reminded me that I should pick somewhere closer because Creativity Week starts on Monday and ends on Thursday. During the past three years, Creativity Week has been from Monday to Friday, which means that I have one less day to make my project happen. This means that I have to work around this obstacle and now plan on picking a closer place.

Stephen and I looked at a few websites where we could find a closer location with an interesting terrain, and we found this website, Texas State Park Guide, that has a highlighted area of Texas with information of Parks in that area. He said that he would be okay to take the group and me anywhere in that area. Now that I have the location narrowed down, I’m one step closer to making it happen.

If any of you have any comments or suggestions, please post them below.

Where do I Go?

Before my project could be “Okayed” by the administration, I would need to give them a plan of when and where this camping trip is going to happen.

I asked one of my teachers at school, Stephen Verla, if he would be willing to help me out with my project, and he said yes. I told him that I wouldn’t want to plan the trip on a weekend because it wasn’t enough time, and it might be better to have the trip during creativity week. There will be much more time during this week, and none of the students will be worried about school related stuff. Stephen agreed that creativity week would be a good time to have the trip, but he wasn’t certain what he was going to do during that week. He said that he was open to student’s ideas for that week, but he would help me out if I got all of the details together.

I was glad after talking with Stephen because I felt assured that my project might actually happen. Now that I have an idea of when this was going to happen, I now needed to know where I would have this camping trip. Stephen recommended somewhere with a mountainous landscape, but the area that I can think of with a mountainous landscape is west Texas. I’ve heard that Big Bend National Park is a beautiful place to go camping, but I don’t know if it would be considered too far from the school’s location; I don’t want to the exhaust the driver.

If anyone can help me out with picking out a location, please comment below.

My Site

I didn’t mention this earlier, but I’m also creating a website, using WIX, about my Senior Project. This website is still being worked on, so you might have some difficulty trying to navigate through it. As I get all of the details for my project together, I will post the updates on my blog and this website.

If you have any comments or questions, please post them below. Also, if you have any tips on how to improve my website, please post them.

Here is the link: http://www.wix.com/juarez17richard/richard_17

This is my big Idea

Video by SIUCCommunications

SIUC Outdoor Leadership Program




This is what I had in mind for my project. I don't mind if this happens on a smaller scale, but I want the individuals who are participating to understand ideas and concepts of the projects, such as leadership skills and the beauty of the outdoors.

Background Information

I’m going to give you a little bit of my camping background. As you know, I went camping with my school’s Young Men’s Group in my 8th grade. This was the first time I’ve been camping so it influenced me a lot because not only was it my first time, but it was a fun trip. This made me want to go camping again because I wanted to go through the same experience. I wanted to be away from civilization with my close friends. I wanted to have fun again. This was when I decided to attend the Woods Project during the summer of my 9th grade.

The Woods Project was awesome. I spent two weeks at Yosemite National Park; during the first week I stayed in cabins, and during the second week, I went backpacking. This trip was very fun because I was with some of my schoolmates and I met other students from different schools. I also learned a lot over the environment of the park and the importance of the outdoors.

During the summer of my 10th grade year, I was selected to attend NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School). The reason I chose to do NOLS was because I wanted to go through the same experience I went through in my previous trips. I went backpacking for a month in the Pacific Northwest with eleven other people. It was an amazing experience to go off for a month and see the world in a different view.

My First Steps

Hello everyone. As many of you know, my name is Richard Juarez and this will be the site where I will post the progress of my Senior Project. First of all, I need to tell you the idea for my project. Throughout the summer, I’ve been brainstorming many ideas for my project, but none of them seemed to interest me.

Then the school year began, and a lot of my classmates already had an idea of their projects; I was clueless about mine. I began to think about things that I enjoyed doing, and camping was the first thing that popped into my mind. I love the outdoors. I feel in love with it during my 8th grade when I went on a camping trip with my school’s Young Men’s Group for the weekend; it was one of the best times I had with my schoolmates. Ever since this experience, I’ve been hooked on camping.

I don’t have a clear idea right now of the direction of my project, but I basically want to create a camping group that will see the same wonders that I see in the outdoors. If any of you have any ideas or comments about my project, feel free to comment below.