By Grace Lee DCI has been one of the biggest parts of my high school experience. But all the pictures I took, captions I wrote, videos I filmed and edited, posters I designed, podcasts I produced, and board meetings I attended were never a part of my plan until September of my freshman year. In fact, I hadn’t even known of the existence of DCI. I walked right past the booth during Spring Preview in eighth grade, and I skimmed over the photo credits on AUSD’s instagram page. Yet, a few weeks after getting the email blast from Mr. Foran about the informational meeting, I found myself sitting in the circle of tables and chairs in the school library’s media center, kind of nervous but mostly excited. And before I knew it, I was covering my first event with a couple of seniors I had never met before.
In that way, DCI is all about seizing the opportunity, being ready for what comes as it comes. Over the past four years, I’ve found that the things I plan rarely end up happening the way I expected them to. But DCI has been part of what helped me learn to work through that. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned: 1. Figure out what your priorities are. For me, the two hardest things to balance were DCI and Cross Country. Both require a lot of time, and a lot of quality time at that. But because I knew that both were important to me, I made sure that I wouldn’t sacrifice one more than the other. Sometimes I’d have to do workouts on my own in the morning, and at other times, I’d have to miss a meeting. In the end, I found a sort of balance, and I think I’m happy with how it all turned out. 2. Don’t wait for someone to tell you what to do. This little piece of advice is something that Mr. Foran has been drilling into our minds since the informational meeting. It’s really true, too. Looking for your own tasks, both in DCI and in the real world in general is the best thing you could do. You get to explore things on your own, you learn how to find the things you’re looking for, and it’s just that much more gratifying when you can say you did everything from start to finish. 3. Just go for it. Mr. Foran or Ms. Nuuvali will sporadically ask DCI for help at a special event. Sometimes it’s last minute, other times it’s an event you’ve never heard of before. But looking back, the most interesting events that I’ve attended were the random ones that were posted in the Facebook group in the middle of summer (the COVID Varsity Boys Basketball CIF championships were super fun). It’s much better to do something and not like a bunch, than it is to regret not doing something. Just go for it, and more often than not, it’ll be worthwhile. And with that said, I hope that you who are reading this make the exciting decision to be a part of the next generation of AUSD DCI interns. Every year the group just gets more and more impressive, and it’s definitely not something you’ll want to miss. Why not?
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Blog Posts Written by DCI Interns and Alumni Archives
February 2024
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