Auction Day:

Well, first day back to sea. It’s Shipboard Drive Auction Day. Every voyage, a committee puts together an auction for the students. People donate objects or services to bid on, and the goal is to raise the most money for the ship. SAS is a non-profit, so they need the help for scholarships and ship maintenance. People donate things like: salsa lessons, patches from around the world, ties, books, paintings, guided trips, house stays, condo stays, ski resort stays in time shares. There are things like: last off the ship, first off, steering the ship for twenty minutes, picking a menu for the day, being the voice for a day, throwing a pie at Prof. Bowler, getting the navigation map from the Navigation Nook. Things like that. We didn’t buy anything, but our voyage set a record: 30,000 raised from the auction alone. Which is a NUTS number. Kids who have their parents credit cards obviously. Still, it’s for a good cause, so we were super stoked!
This goes along with the ShipBoard Drive, which James and I were apart of because of our Study Guide. This is a donation drive for kids to help for the same reason. The goal was 100% participation, but that never happens. We were also shooting for 50,000 dollars, which would break every record that SAS has ever had. James and I sat at a booth for lunches for 4 days straight asking kids to donate. I made a thirty page study guide again for students to study for the final, and I’m telling you, I don’t want to toot my own horn, but James and I made the difference with that thing. Kids donated twice, one for the first one, and once again for the second. People would come up to us and say, is this were I donate for the study guide? It was awesome. Anyway. We ended up making 53,000 dollars! Which I know may seem like a huge number, but it was a HUUUUUGGGGEEEE number. We broke the grand total record by ten grand total. We broke the shipboard donations record by eleven grand total, and I don’t see another voyage catching up to us anytime soon. It was intense. Very successful.
James and I had a lot of kids and staff as well comment on the study guide. The Registrar said she was so glad we posted it because she learned more from it than she did for class. Kids came up to us all the time thanking us, and teachers said they thought it was a great idea. I was glad we did it. We almost didn’t for a bit there. The study guide took some serious work. We already had the first and second parts already finished for the most part, but the third part was intense. Anyway. It was awesome. Something to say in an interview: Oh ya. I was apart of a donations drive and I ended up helping the drive raise over fifty thousand dollars and break every record EVER. ☺
Anyway, the next day I had my marketing exam, which went horrible. I got a 64. But it was the highest in the class, so it ended up being a 100%. Just to give you an idea of how nuts the tests are. I spent every night in port reading that wretched book, and still didn’t know half the test. Hahaha. Luckily no one else did too. Anyway. Just a huge paper to write and a power point presentation and I’ll be done with that class!