Earlier, I had made an entry on a WSJ article titled “Revisiting Teenage Dreams” where students watched video messages to themselves that they had recorded while in high school. At that time, I compared it to the end-of-workshop videos that the YCISL participants recorded to capture the thoughts that have inspired them from their Stanford experience.
We have now implemented a new workshop exercise called “A Message To My Future Self” in which students make a video message to themselves – to be viewed 5 years later or beyond. We also created a companion exercise called “A Message To My Past Self” in which students look back and reflect in written form on advice they would give themselves; a sort of lessons learned exercise. This is all tied in under our “Your Personal Story” theme.
In the AMTMSF exercise, we provided prompts with a couple of PowerPoint slides:
1. To say at the start of the video…
hi! my name is [name]
i am from [home]
today is [date]
i am [age] years old.
this is a message to my future self.
2. Possible things to talk about…
who i hope to be.
what i hope to find.
what i hope to do.
what i hope to have.
what i hope to accomplish.
what i hope to achieve.
what i hope to be remembered for.
how i plan to get there.
As with all YCISL exercises, we hope that all students will think more deeply over time about the thoughts raised by this exercise. Some of the students were able to be very thoughtful despite the short preparation time, whereas others could not put themselves in the necessary frame of mind. As we continue this exercise, I hope to find common threads that we can engrain into the YCISL program to encourage more consideration and discussion.