SOM Outreach

There's this cool club here called SOM Outreach which sets groups of 4 students up with pro-bono consulting projects with local nonprofits. It's a lot of work, but if you are excited about the problems you are tackling you will be really motivated. I am working with 3 awesome members of the class of 2010 to address men's sexual health issues in connecticut. We are charged with figuring out a messaging system that could get young men taking better care of themselves! {C}The other day we invited a group 6 of our classmates over to my place for pizza, beer and brainstorming. It was a great chance to hash through some serious questions we had and to harness the creativity and thoughtfulness of SOMers. There was quite a bit of laughing and there were lots of tough questions. The results: some people thought barriers to testing were not knowing how easy the testing procedure was, others thought threats would work, some even thought challenging someone's manliness would work....there were lots of ideas. Going through this process has really clarified things for our group, and we have tons of witty messages to use as inspiration. It's another illustration of the SOM mindset: your classmates and friends are your best resources and working hard together will yield infinitely better results than working hard alone.