The only interaction with my partners, Dallas and Jacob, was during the Retreat when we were assigned our Best Buddies. Besides exchanging phone numbers, we didn’t communicate until this project. We contacted each other through email and picked a set of questions to go through, sending them back to each other once we had completed them. While it would have been exciting to exchange schools for a day, I still felt like I got to know my partners better. The biggest impression I got from Dallas was his practicality. He has a set plan for life with practical goals, like own a barndominium and make good money. In this sense, we have different aspirations, or rather lack thereof, as I’m indecisive as to what I want to do in my future. He also attested to his competitiveness, citing the tendencies of other people to say how seriously he takes things such as sports and video games, and his drive to win. Another example of Dallas’s perceivable practicality is his statement that he dislikes it when people try to fight fact with opinion. He also stated that he doesn’t really have a place to go and relax, and that the last time he cried from laughing was in sixth grade, which led me to believe that my partner had an elevated sense of maturity than many teenagers our age. The major thing that we both have in common is the aspect of competitiveness. I often find myself bent on trying to be the best on everything I do, which is often in vain and just leads to disappointment. I also found that I had a lot of interests in common with Jacob; probably the top three are our love of Star Wars, our religion, and our view of online school. He discussed how important religion is to him but how he would never push his views on someone else, which is a shared perspective. He also had practical goals, wanting to possibly go into a career involving game design. He described how difficult online school initially was, but how eventually, he settled in. I was never able to fully settle in with online school, as I had a lot of problems staying focused and finding motivation. Being back in-person, I find myself having an easier time with these two aspects. Based on his answers, Jacob exuded a strong drive and a strong foundation upon which he builds his life, through religion as well as his hobbies. On my end, I didn’t really have a problem with sharing things about myself despite Dallas, Jacob and I not knowing each other very well, as I find it cathartic to provide information to people I don’t know as well so that we can establish a baseline of how we view each other. Getting to know my partners enables us to better understand each other’s interests and mindsets so that conversation and friendship may come more easily, as we have things to discuss among ourselves. As previously stated, while it would have been an intriguing experience to visit the school of one of my partners and see how their operations differ from or are similar to mine would have been interesting, I feel as though this activity enabled me to know my partners on a more personal level.