What I wished I had done
Im a recent Eagle Scout and having done my BOR in October and aging out on the day of my BOR. Looking back I had an incredible troop and would recommend scouts to anyone but if there’s one thing I could’ve done differently it would’ve been to Journal.
To me scouts was about adventure and the shenanigans you do with either your crew or troop. Some of my best memories from scouts are honestly just in y things we did on trips. Like when I went to seabase in 2023 a 1/3 of us (my troop sent 3 crews that summer) snuck back to the dorms and stacked 5 mattresses on someone’s top bunk. Albeit there is a photo of it but you won’t always have a camera on you (my troop didn’t allow phones on trips). Or that same trip when it was 10:30pm in the dorms and the other troops adults (not affiliated with our troop so you can imagine how our adults felt having been uninformed by them) told us we were being too loud when an hour earlier their kids had put their mattresses on the floor and had been jumping from the top bunks doing WWE style wrestling!
At the end of the day there’s stuff I’ll always remember but wish I wrote down. So I encourage any SM, ASM or Crew adults to buy notebooks for their scouts before high adventures or after leadership roles as a gift (My troop has a tradition of giving the SPL a Leatherman after their term is up but this could easily be implemented similarly).
That’s my Tedtalk and my Two Cents!