As a person who has never written a formal report this assignment was both exciting and challenging as it was a lot of fun to work on a report that had real life implications but there were definitely a lot of things I had to learn while writing the report. One thing that I believe massively benefited me was that I picked a topic and organization that I was extremely familiar with which made the researching portion of this assignment quite easy as I was given access to a lot of the data I needed from my previous co-workers. With that being said though the survey portion of data collecting was quite difficult to pull off as many parents of the participants were rather skeptic of the survey and it took some convincing before a lot of parents agreed to complete the survey.
A second challenge that I realized extremely quickly is that there is a budget to every single program a company runs. The Richmond Aquatics special needs program was no different and the fact that this was a non-profit program meant that the budget for this program was even smaller than the majority of the other programs that Richmond Aquatics ran. This then really limited a lot of the solutions we originally had on solving the staffing shortage issue of the program as additional funding was simply not possible for a non-profit program like this one.
The peer review process was definitely an interesting one as I myself have actually attended nwHacks which is the organization that Jason decided to conduct his formal report on. The problem that he is addressing in this report in regards to student engagement is a real one and I can tell you first hand that a lot of students whether its because of lack of guidance or motivation do not complete a project. I like Jason also agree that further incentives to the program such as free swag or possible interview from the company could help the program exponentially as better engaged students will lead to better quality projects that are produced at nwHacks which means the overall prestige of the event will also increase.
Link to formal draft Formal report draft