Lo-fi Fridays are now officially the newest addition to Seattle Prep’s programs. A new place to relax at the end of the week during lunch and enjoy the vibes of the Lo-fi music, Lo-fi-Fridays allow students to interact with each other in a smaller space during the hectic lunchtime every week.
Lauren Carlos, the new counseling intern this year, helps set up and run the whole show every Friday during lunch in one of the Ignatius classrooms. This brand-new idea emerged as Carlos was consulting with her counseling team and realized “that there are a lot of students coming in to Prep their freshman year who don’t know a lot of other students since there’s close to 100 different middle schools all feeding into one school. As a counseling team, we were talking about how we can help students feel a sense of belonging, whether they do or don’t know a lot of people at Prep. So that was part of it was focusing on the sense of belonging.”
She adds how she believes to “create space, where students can just pause and take a break. It’s really meant to cultivate a space where students can just come as they are and have a safe space to be themselves.”
Carlos shares how in her previous experiences there was “a similar project that was done by another student at another school. I never met them, but I heard about it that they started Low-fi Fridays and students seemed to like it. I didn’t have personal experience running something like this before coming to Prep, but from what I’ve heard, students like Lo-fi music and so decided to give it a try here.”
Already within a few months Carlos seems to have the feeling of her new environment, making impacts at Prep for the students’ wellness. Despite running Lo-fi Fridays by herself along with some other student leaders, Carlos seems completely unbothered as she always looks forward to it and loves the process of how each Friday goes. Carlos shares what every Friday routine looks like for her during lunch: “We dim the lights, I put on Lo-fi music of the YouTube channel called Lo-fi Girl. Then I’ll usually bring some kind of snack like cookies, and I’ll bring games like Jenga or Connect Four so that people can do something interactive that doesn’t require too much brain power. People also talk to each other and get to know each other.”
Carlos’ main goal of Lofi-Fridays is to have no boundaries to being yourself, which she feels has been accomplished with the community she is building during lunch. Through the first quarter of the school year, Carlos has made lots of great memories with different students as she strongly believes that “there is no time like the present”.
