What is your name? Amanda D’Souza
Where were you born and where do you call home? Technically, I was born in Springfield, Illinois, but consider home a mix of Mililani, Hawai’I and Tucson, Arizona.
What’s your favorite pig-out food? If I could, I would eat burritos every day.
What is your favorite word? Hullabaloo
In which graduate program are you enrolled? I am enrolled in the Master in Public Administration with a concentration in social policy and policy analysis.
Describe the Community Planning Workshop (CPW) project you worked on during the academic year: My team worked on the Ashland Downtown Parking and Multi-Modal Circulation Project this past year. For this project, we analyzed parking and transportation usage in Ashland’s downtown core, an area that sees high demand for parking due to tourist draws such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Our methods included two monitoring sessions, key city interviews, and two surveys sent to Ashland residents. We presented our Project Advisory Committee with a comprehensive list of policy recommendations, as well as provided our own recommendations based on our findings in the past 6 months.
What is the most critical skill( you learned from being engaged in CPW this past year? One of my biggest lessons from this past year was how to adapt your own processes to work with a community. Ashland is a very strong, engaged, and dedicated community, and this impacted our role with our Project Advisory Committee. While our project work itself did not drastically change, our approach did as we shifted from guiding the committee through the policy-making process to serving more as a resource. This shift stressed to the importance of not only stepping back and gauging the strengths of the community you’re serving and but also adapting your work to complement those strengths.
What about CPW made you smile? Beyond the knowledge and skills I have gained, I really enjoyed getting to know my team this year. We had the benefit of clicking from the very start, which allowed us to focus our energy on producing good work rather than spending time learning how to best operate as a group. We rarely had a meeting where we weren’t constantly laughing, which really helped us get through the most stressful stretches of project work.
What are your big summer plans? My big summer plans are just to experience the Oregon summer. Coming from the desert, I fully appreciate the ability to actually go outside and enjoy the sunshine without the triple digit degrees. I’m planning on lots of hikes, lots of rivers, and lots of camping.
What is your ‘best-kept secret’ you’d recommend? It’s not exactly a ‘secret,’ but one of my favorite websites is TEDtalks. It’s a perfect destination for when you’re in need of entertainment, humor, inspiration, or to simply learn about something you know nothing about.
Where can we ‘cyber-stalk’ you? LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pub/amanda-d-souza/38/331/83a/