I’ve never been much of a diagram guy.  My Public Health master’s program spends a good bit of time on program planning and teaching us to create things like logic models, but as someone who tends to be more narrative-focused, writing out my goals in little boxes seemed like an unnecessary step to me.

That was before I started this fellowship.  I have the feeling that the Andrew two months ago who slogged through logic models before getting to the interesting part of the semester project would stare at my new brainstorming and mind mapping charts with suspicion and perhaps wonder what I had done with disorganized creative Andrew.  Personally, I think that until now I just hadn’t found the right tools.

One of the first things I did was ask the other staff members here what their priorities were in restructuring the loan closet, and after coming up with several options, I started to decide on pros and cons.  There was so much I thought I’d lose it if I kept it all in my head, so naturally I wrote some of it down and the page was covered in arrows and side-notes to the extent that I could barely read it.  I searched Google for open source brainstorming software and it’s really helped make everything much clearer.

In XMind, top, and my random thoughts on the project in Word, below. Big difference.

To be honest I was a little intimidated by the project when I started it.  I did my first year field practicum in a hospital and I had a lot of networking opportunities when I sat on the TransOhio board, but the program planning aspect of my education hasn’t been something I’ve had a lot of practice at.  And the loan closet is a big project.  But now that I’m working on it, it seems like it’s coming a lot easier.  The staff here at the ALS Association are very helpful and supportive, and I have ten weeks to focus on just this, which is more time than I’ve ever had available to devote to a project before.

If anything, it’s helping me become a little more organized, which I’m sure my professors would all agree is something I need.