This year, my biomedical innovation class had an assignment called the capstone project, where students were supposed to create their own project that would benefit the community. My group decided to focus on raising awareness and support for the homeless population. We chose this topic because we were all aware of the misconceptions associated with the homeless, such as drug dealing and mental illness. The homeless are typically looked down upon in our society, and there is not much effort put into understanding their perspective or insight. My group wished to touch upon this issue by helping raise support for the homeless population and gaining more personal insights on the struggles that the homeless have to face in their daily lives.
First, our group decided to volunteer for the organization Grandma’s House of Hope in their Christmas Motel Party, which was essentially a holiday celebration for low-income families and homeless people. As volunteers, we were assigned to help run the stations that the people would come too. These stations included pajamas, food, toys, and a meeting with Santa Claus, all for free. Volunteering for this event truly warmed my heart because I was able to see how excited the children were, and the adults seemed so grateful and thanked us multiple times for putting in our time to help out the event. I would definitely want to volunteer for the organization again, since a club on campus, called Youth Philanthropy Worldwide, offers many volunteering events connected with that organization.

Next, our group collected personal insight by talking to the homeless about misconceptions that people have about life as a homeless person and the struggles that they go through daily. The people that we interviewed experienced unfortunate circumstances that caused them to be homeless. For example, a man that we interviewed was an immigrant that worked as a waiter at a restaurant and had a shared room in a house. However, he got sick, since he was rather old, and got fired from his job. Unable to find another job due to his old age, he ended up having to live on the streets. Hearing these stories helped my group understand that the misconceptions and stereotypes surrounding the homeless population were truly unfounded, and there are genuinely good people out there that just did not have luck go in their favor.

This project was able to open my eyes to the reality of how biased our society can be. Not much is being done for the homeless population, and it is important that this attitude changes since the numbers keep on increasing. California has the nation’s highest homelessness rate as well as the nation’s highest homeless population. There was a reported amount of 129,972 homeless people in California in 2018. In order to prevent numbers from increasing, more people need to be informed about the issue of homelessness and there needs to be more involvement in supporting the homeless population through organizations such as Grandma’s House of Hope.

Blending: My short story talks about how I volunteered to help support and raise awareness for the homeless population. I chose this group of people in particular because they are typically looked down upon in society and there are many misconceptions and stereotypes surrounding them. This relates to Thomas Jefferson because he advocated for the Americans when they were being looked down upon by the British government. Jefferson stood up as a leader against the oppression and spoke up for the Americans through the Declaration of Independence.

April 7, 2019

Dear Dairy,

        I have been thinking a lot about colleges recently. Senior year is right around the corner, and along with it comes the stress of college applications and the fear of inevitable rejections arriving in my inbox. I am getting more concerned than ever since I feel unprepared for college and the responsibilities that come with it. Especially in today’s time, competition is very high to get into the popular and high-ranked colleges and universities. After the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal, I hope that colleges and universities will be more fair with admissions and eliminate biases in their system. Applicants should all be given an equal opportunity to demonstrate what they can offer to the school. Offering money to grant admission shows inequality in the application system as well as a lack of ethics in the college admissions officers that were found guilty, since certain students are put above others due to money and not academics. I hope that as we move on to the future, society can move more towards granting equality in all aspects of society.

Until next time,

Vanessa Ngo

Blending: The issue that I talked about with the college admissions scandal relates to issues of inequality. In the college admissions process, many factors are taken into consideration that cause inequality between the applicants, such as race, gender, and in the case of the scandal, wealth. Now that the scandal has been brought to light and the public is aware of what goes on behind the scenes of college admissions, more people will advocate for equality in these areas and focus more on the academic aspect. Inequality relates to the issue that Thomas Jefferson fought against during the Revolution with the line "all men are created equal." Using that phrase in the Declaration of Independence, he called for equality among the people and he called out the British government for violating that human right due to its tyrannical ways of governing the Americans. This can be seen with how the British imposed a lot of taxes on the Americans and did not give them a say in the government.