Biography - Barbera (Taylor)
Name: Barbara (Taylor)
Nationality: American
Age: 18
Role: Chief content writer, researcher, and peer editor
Hello all! (This is my typical ThinkQuest chat greeting). My first name is Barbara, but I prefer to be called by my middle name: Taylor. I am currently a senior (grade 12) at Pinkerton Academy High School in Derry, NH, USA. I live in a very small town called Chester. I’ve enjoyed growing up in a quiet, tranquil area with my parents, my younger brother, and my cats. My brother is a freshman (grade 9) at Pinkerton Academy and we are great friends. I am extremely fortunate to be a student at Pinkerton. It is a great school with passionate, encouraging teachers; advanced programs; and a supportive environment. I enjoy learning new things and having new experiences. Over the last year, my time has mostly been spent devoted to my school-related responsibilities; extracurricular activities, such as swimming; volunteer activities; ThinkQuest; applying to and visiting colleges; and trying to squeeze in fun time with my friends and family. It has been a busy year! I am currently planning on studying human biology and medicine in college next fall. I hope to become a pediatrician someday.
I was approached by Jim, my soon-to-be ThinkQuest coach, in the autumn of last year. Jim works at Pinkerton and had been asking various teachers to recommend students that they felt would make good additions to his ThinkQuest team. Jim found me through my junior year (grade 11) English teacher—as he was looking for content writers. Jim explained ThinkQuest to me, and it sounded like an awesome opportunity. I couldn’t pass it up, and soon enough I became a member of this amazing team.
Originally my job was strictly limited to researching and writing articles. Over time, my role in the team evolved; in addition to completing my other responsibilities, I began to contribute significantly to outside communications and peer editing. I work most closely with Chrissy, my fellow writer and fellow Pinkerton Academy student. Chrissy and I actually knew each other fairly well before we joined the team; we met in our chorus class during our first year in high school, and have since become good friends. Our job as writers is also tied very closely to Harry’s job as a translator—so we did our best to get our articles to Harry in a timely manner for translations.
What have I learned from ThinkQuest? So much! To be honest, I learned a lot more then I ever thought I would have when I started. ThinkQuest is an incredible opportunity for any student who is fortunate enough to take part in it. In addition to learning incredible amounts of information based on my research, writing, and editing on the subject of time, I gained a great deal of personal satisfaction from being on the team. As I mentioned earlier, unique experiences are what I really look forward to in any new undertaking. Being able to collaborate with people from different cultures and countries of the world, with different perspectives on life, was probably one of my favorite parts of being on the team. Some people may think that it would be difficult for a group of kids that is so diverse to get along well right away. Well, we definitely got along fine, right from the beginning! For me, the biggest challenges of the ThinkQuest experience were rising early for online chats, keeping track of all my little assignments and big deadlines, technical difficulties, and balancing my ThinkQuest work with all of my other responsibilities as a senior student in high school.
Despite any problems, I (and the rest of the team) pulled through with the help and encouragement of our two fabulous coaches: Jim and Tina. They were always there to lend their support. My teammates—Kishore, the team leader; Chrissy, my fellow writer; David, a web designer; Ruohan, another web designer; and Harry, our Greek language translator—have all been fun to work with. Kishore has done an amazing job as team leader and has put a Herculean effort into the production of this site. We all were able to look up to him and he really kept our team on task and motivated. David and Ruohan have demonstrated their impressive skills as web designers, evidenced by the resulting games and great programming work on the site. This is something I know very little about. After viewing the site I have immense appreciation for their talents. Chrissy has been a tremendous help to me over the past months. In addition to being a talented writer, she has also taken on many additional small tasks to help take some of the burden off of the rest of the team. I’m sure that everyone on the team is exceedingly grateful to her. Harry’s job as translator demanded patience, as he had to wait for Chrissy and me to finish our articles before he could start his work. Thanks for your patience, Harry! Not only did he do his job well, he also provided a much needed comic relief to many of our team chats. It’s not easy to make someone laugh at 6:00 AM! A million thanks and my highest praise goes out to all of my team members! I’m so glad that I decided to get on board with this ThinkQuest team. I have gained an incredible amount of knowledge, made new friends, and learned some important lessons about team cooperation.
I sincerely hope that you, as the reader, have taken as much from our website as I have taken from the whole ThinkQuest experience. Thank you for visiting our site.