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Gulliver Prep senior Katelyn Hartnett is in the final stages of her Girl Scout Gold Project.
The goal is help teens learn how to bullet journal as a way to improve their mental health.
“I also hold workshops at my school teaching teenagers how to bullet journal and how to get started,” she says.
She learned about bullet journaling from her best friend and went online to do further research.
“I watched a lot of tutorials,” she says.
One of the things that drew her to bullet journaling is the ability to use her artistic side. But bullet journaling can be calming and helps create order in a world that is so chaotic, and as a result it helps relieve anxiety.
“Especially with the world moving at such a fast pace,” she says. “It’s always good to have a place to write it down. Most people do it in a physical journal. It includes art. It’s a way to get yourself moving a little more creatively. Writing everything down you have to do for the day. It makes me and a lot of people more calm when you see it physically.”
She says the other day she was feeling overwhelmed because she thought she had so many things to do.
“But once I wrote it down, I thought, okay, it’s not as much as I thought,” she says. “Stress can be a good thing, it can make you a better student, a better athlete. But overwhelming stress, no, we got to take care of this.”
Hartnett has been doing workshops over Zoom for her fellow students. She will soon be launching a blog called Mirjournaling.com and will also start an Instagram page to promote the blog.
She will be branching out and offering workshops to other schools soon. Reaction to the workshops has been good.
“A couple of people have come up to me and shown me what they have done,” she says. “If I hold a couple more, I think it will have a good impact on not only the people at Gulliver, but other people as well.”
At Gulliver, Harnett takes Advanced Placement Drawing. For her central theme, she’s drawing her friends and capturing their personalities with color and style. She prefers using color pencils or acrylic paint. She is currently using more vibrant colors, especially to capture her friend’s personalities.
Her career goal is to become an orthopedic surgeon for sports medicine. She spent time observing people coming back from sports injuries from the time she has spent getting physical therapy from the sports injuries she has suffered from playing soccer.
“I’ve had a ton of ankle sprain and knee problems in the past,” she says. “I used to go to physical therapy a lot. And my brother had elbow surgery. I watched it, it didn’t gross me out, it was kind of cool.”
She plays on Gulliver’s varsity team and has been named captain this year.
Hartnett has applied to Duke, Stanford, Cornell, Emory, Brown, Vanderbilt, Boston College, Washington University in St. Louis, FSU and the University of Florida.
At Gulliver she’s a member of the National Honor Society, the treasurer of the National Art Honor Society, The Spanish National Honor Society, the English National Honor Society, the Science National Honor Society, Rho Kappa and Mu Alpha Theta. She’s also a board member of Key Club and a member of the Gulliver Prep Academic Honor Council.
As the soccer team captain, she’s on the Student Athlete Leadership Board.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
