molly tompkins

My topic for my Gateway project was a originally a book I co-authored in high school on this history of Hickory Hills, my local city-owned ski area, titled Light the Night. The book is over 100 pages and tells the personal stories of over eighty individuals who learned to ski and spent their childhoods at Hickory. Light the Night has a community focus and many overarching themes and eventually raised over $30,000 for the hill through book profits and community donations. The project sparked my interest in storytelling and service learning. The audience for the book when it was published was community members and skiers nationwide who have experienced the unique spirit of Hickory.

 

I went through several ideas for my repurposing and remediation project before settling on the ones I actually pursued. I was targeting a difficult audience to capture- 12-18 year olds- because I knew they would also be most impactful. With this in mind, I repurposed the book into a BuzzFeed-like article on the reasons young people should help save Hickory Hills, hoping to share my own story with young students in my hometown area and engage them in community activism for Hickory as well. This experience really shaped me as a person and writer and I wanted to get others interested in pursuing something similar at a young age.

 

My remediation project is an Instagram account for the non-profit, Preserve Hickory, that includes several historical and modern photos and encourages young people to get involved in sharing their experiences and love for Hickory Hills through photos and social media engagement. Keeping my audience in mind was a constant battle, as I was consistently revising my language and approach to appeal to a younger demographic. I spoke with my 14-year-old brother, a skier himself, and several of his friends, asking them what they thought was most important in getting a message across on BuzzFeed and Instagram, apps they claim to visit multiple times a day. I also used other non-profits and similar organizations to model my approach. Below are links to pages for my three major projects in the Minor in Writing.