Spotlight On ICI Alumni: Muhammad Amjad

We are proud to work amongst talented youth and adult researchers. During the summer, the Intergenerational Change Initiative launched our ChangeFocusNYC project and brought together amazing adult and young researchers to conduct and code valuable research. At the end of the summer, some researchers transitions to postsecondary opportunities and took the experience of working at ICI with them to college, professional opportunities, and to other places that life inspired them to pursue. We caught up with Muhammad Amjad, who is currently a first year student at SUNY Alfred State. Muhammad shares with uss some of his thoughts on being part of ICI and some great advice for researchers who recently joined our team. Check it out below!

Muhammad shares:
I am enrolled in college and don’t really have a specific project I’m working on at the moment but I do look forward to seeing what the campus has to offer in terms of being a researcher and youth activist.
Some of the most important lessons I learned during the summer was teamwork. We were all extremely new to the process of being researchers, facilitators, note takers, and coders but we knew that we had a goal we had to reach so everyone tried their best and did was the in the best interest of our overall goal not personal preferences.

My favorite part was in the morning walking in and seeing everybody energy each and every day to work harder and the willingness to improve it helped everyone get tasks done.
The summer program strengthened me by making me a proper time manager and taught me how to get humongous acts done in short period of times which is extremely helpful in college.
In the future I plan on working with the institute again to help our outreach get to as far as it possibly can and raise awareness everywhere we can.

​The advice I would give new researchers or new members of the team would be to work hard. They can do it or else they wouldn’t have been chosen. Sarah and team are really good at picking people for the job so if they picked you that mean you have what it takes so don’t undercut yourself and let them help you reach your true potential.

And to end, I would just like to say Sarah is the best boss ever and the skills I learned from her, Jen, and Lisa are skills I can use in any aspect of my life at any time that will help me hopefully stand out when working.