Part two: putting it to work
The same experience, shaped into something Carlos can actually say out loud.
What you're looking at
Carlos's story is drawn from an applied social science course where the class studied food insecurity and food waste in the local community. Below is the Story Core built from that experience, followed by the Story Works adaptation from it.
Read it however helps. Straight through to see the whole arc, or jump to the stage you're stuck on.
Part one: Carlos's Story Core
The structured record of what happened, what he did, and what he learned.
Choosing an experience
What was the situation or context?
In my applied social science course our class examined food insecurity and food waste in the local community.
What did you do?
We did research and outreach to understand what was happening locally and to raise awareness about food waste and distributing excess food to those in need.
Why does it matter?
This experience dealt with real challenges in the community. It helped me understand sociological theories, learn more about leadership, inequality, and how people work and solve problems together.
Situation
The tool asked
- What was happening in this situation?
- What project, assignment, or challenge were you working on?
- Why is this project meaningful?
I took an applied social sciences course where we examined food insecurity and food waste in the local community. It was the first class I had that focused on using sociology theory and methods to take action to help improve communities.
Task
The tool asked
- What goal or requirement did you need to meet?
- What specific role or responsibility did you have?
- Was anything about this task new or challenging?
I worked in a small team to carry out a mini-research project. Our job was to investigate what grocery stores do with food that isn't purchased. My task was to help design our project, collect the data, and help share our findings with different groups.
Actions & Results
What steps did you take?
- Helped create interview questions and contacted managers by email to make arrangements for nterviews.
- Collected data through face-to-face interviews and kept a photo journal.
- Used content analysis to identify themes and patterns about how food waste is handled.
- Connected our results to sociological theories and concepts.
- Worked with other students in the class to create a presentation and digital poster.
What happened as a result?
- Presented our findings at a campus event.
- Created materials for a public awareness campaign.
- Saw more clearly how community organization impacts food insecurity.
Spot my Skills in Action
Skills in Action Carlos spotted in his own draft
- Civic Responsibility
- Purposeful Communication
- Teamwork & Collaboration
- Critical Thinking & Inquiry
Then he took two of them further
Purposeful Communication
- Describe the skill
- Reported research findings to both campus and community audiences.
- Translate into skills language
- I used the results from our research to create content for a campus campaign so people could see how their choices connect to broader community issues.
Civic Responsibility
- Describe the skill
- Applied sociological methods and insights to raise awareness and promote social change.
- Translate into skills language
- I used results from research to help others understand the kinds of challenges that exist in the community and encouraged people to take responsibility for reducing waste.
Reflect
Carlos worked through all four dimensions of growth. Note how short each entry is. Reflection doesn't have to be an essay.
What you can do
- Improved my communication and presentation skills.
- Feel more confident I can speak about community issues and explain why they matter.
- Learned how to interpret research to help people understand and adjusted the message for different audiences.
- It was hard to know the best style for different audiences. I focused on a few key points and avoided jargon.
How you think
- See how sociology is applied in the real world.
- Wondering how I can use sociology to address challenges in my own community.
- Saw how getting community members involved makes social projects stronger.
- Got to know more about the community.
Who you're becoming
- I see how what I'm learning can help other people.
- I realized I like projects that use research to improve how communities work together.
- Want to do more in community education or outreach work.
The impact you create
- Learned how to adjust messages for different audiences and use feedback to gain clarity and shared understanding.
- Used communication skills to influence how people and communities think about food insecurity and food waste.
This is Phase 3 of Deepen Your Story
The four dimensions above are the same four lenses used in , Phase 3: What you can do, How you think, Who you're becoming, and The impact you create. They exist to capture the growth that no skill name covers.
- Notice what lands where.
- Adapting his message for different audiences sits under What you can do, because they are things Carlos demonstrated he is capable of and his confidence is growing. Growth through difficulty isn't a separate category; it shows up inside whichever dimension it changed.
- Not every dimension needs the same weight.
- Carlos has five bullets under one dimension and two under another. Uneven is normal. Forcing equal coverage produces filler.
Carlos's micro-narrative 218 words
This past spring I took part in a class project focused on food insecurity and food waste in our community. Our goal was to understand how local organizations manage excess food and how those efforts could better serve people facing food insecurity.
It was my responsibility to help design and conduct interviews with local food providers, analyze our data, and connect what we found to broader sociological concepts about systems and social responsibility. We took our findings and created a campus awareness campaign. We created digital posters and delivered presentations to educate people on how our decisions and actions about food connect to food waste and insecurity in the community.
This project made me think about civic responsibility differently than I had before, and how research can be used to make positive change in communities. To do that effectively, it's important to know your audience and communicate with purpose so people can understand the information for themselves and think about how it relates to them and their community. Communication is about more than giving people information. It's about helping people understand and care about the problem, listening to what they have to say about it, and helping them see how they can be part of the solution.
Looking ahead: carrying this forward
This experience helped me see how I can use sociology to make a bigger impact. I realized how much I enjoy projects that connect research to community action, and I want to keep using my communication skills in roles that bring people together around community issues like food and housing insecurity. It showed me the kind of work that feels most meaningful to me involves using what I know to help make positive change.
Why this micro-narrative works
If you're comparing your own draft against Carlos's, these are the moves worth borrowing:
- It opens with context, not a claim.
- The first sentence tells you when, where, and what. A listener knows where they are before Carlos asks them to be impressed by anything.
- The verbs do the work.
- Designed, conducted, analyzed, connected, turned. Specific actions, not "was involved in" or "had the opportunity to."
- Skills are named and shown.
- He names purposeful communication, then immediately proves it by describing what he actually did: sharing complex findings in clear, relatable ways for different audiences. A named skill without evidence is just a claim.
- The reflection is woven in, not bolted on.
- The third paragraph is insight, not summary. "Communication isn't just about delivering information" is Carlos thinking, not Carlos reporting.
- It ends facing forward.
- The closing connects a class project to the kind of work he wants next, which is what an interviewer is actually listening for.
- It surfaces thinking.
- "This project made me think about…" shows.
Watch the Core become the story
Almost nothing in the micro-narrative is new. It's all lifted from the Story Core above and reshaped:
- Situation and Task → paragraph one.
- Two long tool answers compress into two sentences. Detail gets dropped, not invented.
- Actions & Results → paragraph two.
- Bulleted statements become one flowing sentence about his role, plus one about what the team produced.
- Skills in Action → paragraph three.
- The capabilities surfaced in the "translate into skills language" carry over to the micro-narrative.
- “Who you're becoming” → looking ahead.
- The short bullets from that dimension become the closing paragraph. This is why the Reflect stage is worth the effort even when it feels like busywork.
Read the others
The micro-narrative is built from a Story Core that is already completed. The other stories in this set show the same process from different angles: