Hi! I’m Neha, a 16 year old interested in lots of things like technology, art, diversity and much much more. I hope to create a tangible impact on this world and these newsletters are my way of tracking myself do just that!
PCOS
This month, I decided to finally take the step towards a project I had been thinking of doing for months! PCOS has always been a topic close to my heart, since many people close to me have been diagnosed with it. However, it is frustratingly hard to diagnose, meaning that 70% of women with PCOS remain undiagnosed.
Another problem is that so many people who raise awareness about it highlight infertility as the key issue linked to it, however, it is linked to so much more, like endometrial cancer, diabetes, sleep apnea and more! This means that so many young women who aren’t thinking of having a baby couldn't care less about the disease, not knowing that it will impact them in ways they didn’t know of.
To combat this, I opened an Instagram account called @pcos.pals (please like, comment and follow) and I am currently building a website (which will be released soon).
Building a website
While creating the website for PCOS Pals, I was faced with a terrible problem. After 1 week of working on the website every day for hours on end, I woke up to find that it had been deleted. Although it was an honest mistake, it felt like I had wasted all that time. However, there was a fairly old backup of the website, made on the second day of production.
This taught me a VERY important lesson- BACKUP ALL OF YOUR WORK!
Now I like to keep a folder on my Google Drive of my website every time I finish a key feature and I will ensure that I keep it this way!
Brainbee
This month, I also participated in the UK neuroscience Brainbee olympiad. It was really interesting to learn so much about the brain and I’m really excited to go even deeper into the topic. The brain really is a fascinating organ!
BCIs
This month, I released my article about using my Muse EEG headband to decipher signals that were coming from my brain. Follow my step-by-step tutorial to do this yourself!
Meta competition
For 2 and a half weeks in December, TKS students were allowed to compete in a sprint challenge. This time we were allowed to work in teams to make a slide deck for either Google or Meta. Since our team chose Meta, our prompt was “What can Meta do to ensure the safety of young people that use its products? As Meta ventures more into the Metaverse, what ideas are important to consider to provide a high quality, non-harmful experience for younger platform users?”.
Leadership
Becoming a PM was one of the best decisions I made in this challenge. Although I was often the PM in other teams, this was the longest team competition I had done to date. Since our group consisted of 4 people it was imperative that everyone was coordinated with each other and I was responsible for ensuring that happened. Here are 3 lessons I learned about leadership from the challenge:
Make sure everyone is on the same page
At the beginning of the challenge, we decided that the best way to ensure that everyone knew what work they needed to do was by creating a calendar that was updated with a to-do list for each day.
However, it’s often underestimated how important it is to ensure that everyone understands what is going on in the meeting. Although it may have seemed clear to me what everyone needed to do, the next time we had a meeting to discuss our team’s next action items, many seemed to not know what they were meant to be doing, which led to an overlap of work or work that just wasn’t up to the standard necessary.
To overcome this, I simply asked everyone to explain their action items for the next meeting at the end of our meeting. This allowed us to quickly mitigate any issues that may have come up.
Planning
We identified early on that it was so important to make sure that we paced ourselves in a way that meant we wouldn’t be rushing to finish everything on time. Therefore, we decided to use the calendar feature on Notion to plan out in the first meeting when we would like to finish big tasks. Over time, the calendar became more detailed as we would use it to also add our daily tasks.
Something that I would improve about this would be to use a Google spreadsheet or Excel spreadsheet instead just for the key dates. This would help me and my team visualise the importance of getting work done by a certain deadline, meaning that we would likely be more driven to complete our work definitely by a certain deadline.
Although our team met some deadlines, some were pushed back because we needed the whole team to work on them with strong efforts. I think being more strict with the deadlines would be better.
A strong part of this would also have to do with communication, so in the future, I would encourage more communication within my team, since we found that miscommunication was the biggest barrier in this challenge.
Focus
We needed to be able to get as much work as possible done in the time given to us. The key to this would be having a strong focus throughout meetings. However, as we reached the deadline and team members were pulling all-nighters, due to timezone issues, our focus began to dwindle.
In the future, perhaps something that I would implement would be to set 10-minute timers and to check up on the team’s focus every 10 minutes of the meeting to ensure that we were all getting as much work done as possible in each minute of the meeting.
Too much advice
A problem we faced near the end was with the feedback we received. We reached out to many people for feedback on our slide deck, however, we were often faced with conflicting feedback. This led us to spending loads of time just figuring out whose advice we should follow.
A workaround for this that I would like to use in future projects is to create a spreadsheet of people we are reaching out to for feedback and rank them in terms of who we think will provide the most valuable information. This might make the task easier for us as well!
Team dynamics
Throughout this challenge, I learned the great importance of team dynamics. It was displayed the most when we had conflicting ideas but we were all able to come to a compromise together each time that would still give us the result we wanted. Additionally, it was just super fun to spend so much time with the people I liked in this challenge. Near the end, we were spending whole days together, but it was a fun experience since my team members were also my friends!!
Slide decks
Before starting the challenge, I honestly had never seen a slide deck before. I didn’t even know what they were! However, after those few weeks, I can confidently say that I have grown so much in terms of being able to develop a slide deck.
A big takeaway from this would be to STORYTELL!!! I have learnt that learning to tell stories is one of the most valuable things to learn to increase your value. In future slide decks, I will work more on storytelling.
Other important bits that I would touch on would be to implement great visuals and aesthetics. A piece of advice that we received was to pick 3-5 main colours and stick to them throughout the slide deck, because if not, the slide deck can look messy. This is also important for the size of the text on the slides!
Here’s my team’s slide deck! We would really appreciate any further feedback!
Meeting people from across the world
One great thing about TKS is the fact that I can meet people from across the world! At the beginning of December, I had the opportunity to do just that with Ilinca! It was great showing Ilinca around and we had some thought-provoking conversations!
Book
This month I finished reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. It was a wonderful read and I loved the aspects of magic that it brought about. It’s been so long since I’ve last come across magic in a book and it was truly amazing how it captivated me!
The lesson I took away from the book was that the life that you are currently living is the best life that you can have. The book plays with the idea of regrets, something that many of us say that we have by providing the protagonist with a magical book of all the regrets she has had in her life. Reading this book also made me remember that I should only work towards what makes me happy and feel fulfilled for I believe that those actions are what I am going to regret the least. This links closely to a quote that I really enjoy:
“Regret is the most painful thing you can experience in life”
Holidays
The Christmas holidays came round and they were a great time for rest and recovery! So many people underestimate the importance of rest, as many people get their greatest ideas in these times. Taking a pause allows you to be bored and boredom accelerates creativity! The next time you feel bored, let your mind wander- it might just take you to places you never thought you could go to.
Thanks for reading. If you are interested or have any questions, please email me at neha.adapala@gmail.com
Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neha-adapala-7b2a56231/