The Pinnacle, written by Aaditya Srikanth Sudarshan
This week saw us present our final solution titled “Lifestyle skills for opioid abuse awareness”. Working together for close to ten weeks helped us formulate our solution to curb the opioid epidemic by targeting children in the PreK-grade 3 age group. We previously received feedback about our draft presentation from Dr. Blackburn and implemented the changes suggested, along with other valuable feedback. We additionally drafted the required budget and projected plans for the subsequent phases, to assess the feasibility of our solution. In addition to this, each of us spent the entire week updating and fine-tuning our final solution. We meet last Sunday, along with Dr. Blackburn to discuss the final deliverables and discussed the presentation, before settling on the individual slides we were to present.
We met early on the day of presentation and did quick mock presentations to ensure clarity and continuity of our presentation. We prepared our cue cards to make sure we don’t leave any part of our presentation unanswered, and our coordination and team dynamics made it possible for us to carry this forward in a relaxed manner. Stephanie took care of ensuring coherence in the presentation along with Rebecca who also designed our life style skills pyramid. Anna and Taylor helped formulate the activities and I designed the parent handouts. All of us presented confidently and received positive feedback from the judges for our solution, giving us the satisfaction of carrying this out well. This wouldn’t have been possible without the contribution of every single person in the team along with our impeccable coordination and cooperation.
Overall, this was a great learning experience which gave us an avenue to work with different disciplines while coming up with an effective solution. The input of each member could clearly be seen in our final solution. Working on it truly showed the impact opioids have caused to the society, especially with the younger population and gave us a direction for devising future strategies. I had a great experience travelling with my team in this journey and I hope this experience proves fruitful to each of us in our future endeavors. On behalf of the team, I would like to thank Dr. Blackburn for assisting and providing us with valuable suggestions, and all the organizers for making the event informative and progressive.
