Around a month ago one of my old teachers from a few years ago had invited me to a workshop called “the Quest” that took place last week. I’ll try my best to describe the workshop and what we did.
From my understanding, the Quest has been around for many years. Each year there’s a different theme. This year’s theme was The Quest For Well Being: Making Connections, Making Commitments. The goal of the Quest is to educate participants about these different themes. You can read more about the Quest here.
The thing that I was doing along with multiple other students from other classes had to do with identity. The teacher said was that there would be an art project that people would along with recording a statement about themselves. The art project required you to think about various things you identify with and draw those things onto a piece of paper that had a picture of you glued onto it. The statement was one where you said something that other people might not immediately notice about you. For example, “I am more than an Asian boy with glasses”.
However, my job had nothing to do with the art project and more with the statements. The way our booth/station worked was that there would be a slideshow updating with different people’s statements. My job was to wait for people to upload their statements to a shared folder and then add the video files to an iMovie project. I was actually supposed to have a few more things to do, but there were other students there who were happy to do them for me.
Originally while we were setting up our booth at the venue, we had problems with the printer for the art project, but we managed to sort things out. We were also worried about not being able to keep up with lots of people coming since it was a pretty large event. On the other hand, when people actually started coming out of the auditorium where they were waiting, they weren’t who we were expecting. From what the teacher overseeing our whole project had informed us, we expected kids that would be doing our project. However, the people that were at the workshop were actually people like educators and board directors. Therefore, most people that walked by our booth didn’t really have time to sit down and take half an hour to do an art project.
Although our project didn’t go as planned, we still got a few people to stay throughout the whole process. One of those people was our old principal who we weren’t expecting to see. Even by the end of the day, the printer started having problems again.
In conclusion, the Quest was quite different from what I had expected. I can’t really say I had fun or that it was particularly a bad experience. One thing I was surprised by though while researching was that Justin Trudeau was a previous speaker at the Quest.