Reflection
The members of the Student Metrocard team are reflecting on the process of creating this blog.
Ananya Sharma-Bhagat
As this school year comes to an end, I’d say I felt particularly passionate about making The Student Metrocard a success! When I thought about this project it occured to me how important the student metrocard has been in shaping my entire highschool experience. Growing up at the cusp of Queens and Nassau County, my childhood was filled with experiences farther from the city and five boroughs of New York. Upon attending BSGE in 2018 and receiving my student metrocard for the commute between my home and school, I realized the importance of public transportation in making places accessible for everyone. This inspired me to embark on a journey of using my metrocard to discover new places around New York City at little to no cost. After the pandemic, it became clear that the experiences and opportunities to travel which I enjoyed throughout 9th and 10th grade were deprived of the new underclassmen. In greater scope, it became important for me to encourage others to take the time out of their busy days to enjoy the places around them without the stress of being on a tight financial budget.
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Reflecting back on how our group carried out this project, I think we definitely made some great accomplishments but also came across some shortcomings. Our group did really well in communicating and brainstorming ideas for places to post blogs about. I’d say we did a good job at widening the scope of our locations to be decently spread throughout parts of NYC. From many of my peers who viewed the site, I learned that the blogs were intriguing, informative, and convincing enough for people to follow some of our suggestions! However, our project lacked in reaching the majority of its target audience. Because our social media advertisement of this project started late, we weren’t able to spread as much awareness as we liked. Likewise, organizing the trips to the location we decided upon was a bit difficult as many of our schedules didn’t align which indirectly resulted in fewer blogs than we had planned to post. Nevertheless, the dynamic of our group and our shared appreciation for the project created a positive environment which incentivized us to continue working towards our goal.
Karishma Reddy
The Student Metrocard has been a way for me to share my favorite places that I love going to with other students and to encourage other people to go and visit new places. BSGE is a very academically intense school and many of these places on the blog have been places that I've gone to spend time with my friends and cool off after long days of studying. I didn't know about all of these places when I first started going to BSGE and I've learned about them throughout my six years here. I thought it would be good to share these places with other students so they can see the opportunities that students have with something as simple as a MetroCard.
Overall, I'm fairly satisfied with our project because I feel that we were able to show people the places that they could visit and the abundance of opportunities available with the swipe of a Student MetroCard. In the process, I think we were able to promote some small businesses to show how they've contributed to our community and I think it's been an exciting experience overall. I think it probably would have been more successful if we were able to reach out to even more students than we did, but in general, I'm pretty happy with our project.
Overall, the dynamic of the group was determined by when we were available and the places that we lived closest to. We realize that students live all over NYC and your MetroCard can take you to so many different places. So we picked places all over NYC to show the variety of places that people can go and we usually tried to organize our places and posts based on where each person lived.
Sama Nada
I chose to create this project because I feel like it resonated with my experiences of being a teenager in NYC. While being a teen in NYC means that we get experiences that others don't, it often comes with a high price tag. However, once you start digging around you find things that are free (or heavily discounted) that allow you as a student to have experiences that you may not have otherwise been able to have. These things are as simple as biking, swimming, and attending plays.This blog also offered the opportunity to show how we can connect to nature in places close to home instead of staying indoors all day on our electronics or walking on the cement sidewalk.
I think that we were pretty successful in achieving our goal of creating a place where we can have all of these ideas in one website that people can just scroll through when they are bored so they get up and go. This project was also beneficial to me as it forced me to get out and explore places even when I thought I was too busy with schoolwork. It also allowed me to be more collaborative and create stronger friendships as a lot of time was spent sitting with my group members talking about the project and forming stronger bonds when we went on these trips. However, one thing that we do need to work on is reaching more people which is definitely more difficult than I thought it would be. Overall I think we were able to help people who did get a chance to view the blog and since its a blog I am sure that it will reach many more people over the years.
Ashra Ali
With the creation of the Student Metrocard, I was able to explore more parts of the city that I wasn’t originally familiar with while also being able to do it without spending so much money. Affordability and accessibility to being able to do fun activities whether that is in a group setting or by myself is a very important issue to me because I live in a city where there’s so much to do and see but not all of them are affordable which is why we chose the Student Metrocard. Affordable traveling to me means being able to explore new sights without having to worry about so much money being spent. Through my own exploring I was able to see so much more of the city and I had a great time exploring the city and learning more about my own neighborhood. With the pandemic still happening, we’ve all had to adjust to a new normal and with the help of Student Metrocard, I’ve been able to learn and see more of what that looks like.
I did struggle with finding covid restriction friendly places to go where you can do activities with groups and individually, but luckily parks are always a great place to start with. Although I was somewhat familiar with Flushing Meadows Park, I never took the time to explore the park in-depth which is what I was able to do with the help of our CAS project. With the help of teamwork, we were able to each individually explore and share our findings with each other and strengthen our CAS project to work towards our goal of traveling around the city through affordable means and taking advantage of our student metrocards. We essentially went with the divide and conquer approach so that we could get a diversity in the areas being explored so different interests could be catered to.
I had a great time exploring the city and learning more about my own neighborhood. With the pandemic still happening, we’ve all had to adjust to a new normal and with the help of Student Metrocard, I’ve been able to learn and see more of what that looks like.
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Molly McIntyre-Polner
Throughout the process of creating the Student metrocard I was able to explore the city more closely and also just have an extremely fun time. Having a student metrocard is something that is underrated by a lot of people, in my opinion. There are tons of opportunities and places to go, and having both that, and a student ID can get you a lot farther than you think. I enjoy walking around the city and exploring different areas and places. Being able to go to museums and see exhibits that I probably wouldn’t have looked at if not for the CAS project, or going to visit locations that I hadn’t in a while, like the governors island ferry. NYC is definitely a place where spending money can come easily, so it can be easily forgotten how many fun and free (if not very cheap) activities actually exist, plus, walking around the city is a great form of exercise, and you’d be shocked at how many steps you can easily accumulate. Overall, I think the CAS project was extremely successful and hopefully this will be helpful to any students in the future if you’re ever looking for a fun day activity or a quick outing!