My name is Maddie Ryan, and I am lucky enough to attend my second year of DLab in Lab51, intending to graduate in 2022. Throughout my experience at the school, I've learned many valuable things, had many valuable experiences, and have met so many amazing people. My biggest goal before graduating is to discover who I am and what I'm passionate about. I want to deeply connect with the exploration of life to find out who I really am and what really interests me while going into the real world. This relates to almost all of the work I’ve done because all along I've been discovering myself and my interests. I’ve been lucky enough to focus so much of my time finding my interests and discovering what I'm really passionate about with the help and support of others around me.
To me, doing good can mean so many things. It can be a random act of kindness that makes someone’s day, or spending weeks or months on a project for someone or something in the community. I feel it’s important to always treat others with the love and respect that they deserve and to empathize with them if you have disagreements or want to get their perspective.
For my DLab experience this fall, I focused on the UN’s Global Goal #5, which is gender equality, and was lucky enough to get a very valuable empathy experience with others in the community. I was able to go to the polling booths on Election Day and asked strangers questions related to women in politics. The experience was very valuable to me because we were able to get real, different perspectives on the world, and I feel that something like that can be the first step to doing good and to make the world a better place. Empathizing with others and listening to others can be very beneficial. As I worked with the topic for the four weeks we spent on it, it really made me think about all the different people in the world who probably wouldn’t agree with me on the subject I was focusing on, which can be very frustrating. It breaks my heart to see that there are people out there that aren’t willing to look at what’s going on around them and act on that. Something that I personally want to do, even if I can’t make a big impact, is to educate these people as well as myself on certain topics, such as gender equality, in order to make the world a more enjoyable place to live.
I think that projects like this help people understand the severity of certain situations and topics. That can definitely help spark interest and discussion which can lead to inspiring others. Not being educated on a topic is where ignorance is formed, so I think that more education on certain topics would be very beneficial to society and make serious topics more normalized and open to discussion. Over the past 10 weeks, I’ve been able to learn more and more about myself. Focusing on new and foreign topics has helped me discover who I am and my passions more and more, and I couldn’t thank Lab51 enough for making that a possibility for me.
