I am currently only a week away from being completely finished with working on my BA in Communication and Digital, Art, & Technology at Bellarmine University. I have been in school continuously for 16 years at this point and while I knew this day would eventually come, especially under current circumstances, it feels rather surreal.
Obviously I have grown over time and my personality and what I am passionate about are constantly changing. I can say with full confidence that my 4 years in college have helped me become more aware of the person I am / who I want to be more than any of my other schooling experiences. When I was in high school I had no idea what I wanted to do and honestly did not even expect to go to secondary school. Thankfully, Bellarmine reached out and provided my family some financial support so that I could walk down the path I did. It wasn’t until my second semester of freshman year that I declared communication as a major and digital media as a minor and late into my junior year I added digital, art, & technology.
If I had not been exposed to the world of design in one of my classes for my minor I wouldn’t even have this blog truth be told. So here’s a thank you to Bellarmine, the friends I have made and the experiences I had all while under your guidance! With that being said I wanted to take some time to reflect on one of my final courses, digital portfolio.
At the beginning of the semester our professor asked us to complete a brief writing assignment acknowledging our expectations for this course. Originally my response was short and sweet, as follows:
1. What do you expect to learn in this course?
techniques and strategies for online application
2. How much experience with technology do you currently have?
very proficient
3. What are your goals for this course?
To be confident in my website development and online presence/ ability to create one
4. What are the biggest challenges you’ll face in this course?
not being a perfectionist/ appreciating the value of my work at any stage of the process.
5. How do you plan to overcome those challenges?
By not being a negative nancy and acknowledging the lessons I am learning along the way.
Seeing my response alone I can tell how much I have grown in this course. I think my professor took a great approach to the flow of this class. The first 5 weeks had a rather slow start as we were learning techniques and strategies for online application through our textbook and other resources. Most of our assignments during this period consisted of us researching social media sites and influencers / micro celebs who are doing what we want to be doing. I appreciated this method of instruction because it pushes us to dig into why we like the content we like and how to adapt ourselves to create that type of content by simply paying attention to detail. I feel like these types of exercises help me consider why I am making what I am making and what I want to achieve from it.
After the first 5 weeks we started to apply our newly understood techniques to our social media presences online. Among those assignments we created an introduction video to post on a complete YouTube channel (ie. contains cover art, user photo, about, etc.), filled out/enhanced our LinkedIn accounts, created a basic Google Doc resume, conducted an individual project, and then we made a complete portfolio website.
I think given the time frame we have in the course these are great areas to focus on especially for seniors about to graduate. I feel that the first 5 weeks covered my first response and now at the end I feel my 3rd response was achieved because I have a website that I am proud of and I feel that I am growing my social media presence pretty well / have a better understanding of how to do so. I do still think I need to continue updating and improving my portfolio / online presence so that my search results will be more fine tuned.
Of all my projects I am most proud of my individual project and my final website. for my individual project I wanted to invest some time into creating content for my YouTube channel. I have been a huge fan / consumer of YouTube for a while and have always wanted to have presence on there so I found this to be a great project to do so. I already had a few videos on my account, prior to this project we uploaded our introduction videos and then I published 2 more during this assignment.
I am really proud of how the two videos I made turned out especially considering the amount of planning, time, and effort I put into them. I feel that the videos I’m starting to make are a lot more in line with the style of content I want to produce. I feel like this project was a great opportunity for me to exercise my skill set and to build my portfolio and online presence. My favorite video I created to date which was for this project is below if you want to check it out!
Our final project was to create a portfolio website. I had been anticipating making one as I graduated because I wanted to have a nice place to showcase all my work and to direct my future employers to. I used Wix to create my site, I customized a template, added in my personal info and designed it to my taste. I have previous experience working with Wix, I really like the features this site offers and I feel it is important to practice working in this platform as so many people use it these days. I spent a lot of time organizing all the information and work I wanted to showcase while also implementing links to external sources like my social media, blogs, and more. Overall I think I have a nice base site to work off of and as my skills improve and I grow professionally I can easily adapt it to meet my needs. Below are some screencaps of my site or you can check it out here!
Even though I am proud of the majority of my work I have accomplished this semester let alone just in this class, there was one assignment in particular that I think could use improvement.
The introduction video we created was the first production type of assignment we had in this class and probably the 3rd one I had this semester throughout all my classes. I had a lot of ideas that I was not able to incorporate into this project and I feel like the ending result came out a little rushed. I am really proud of how my video production skills have progressed over this semester, and even though my original video still gets my message across and works for now, I definitely plan to create another intro video soon as I will have more time after graduation.
Looking back on biggest challenge going into this course let alone my final semester I think I have grown so much as an artist when it comes to not letting the idea of perfection control my mindset or projects. I struggled a lot over the years but especially this semester coming to terms with this as I had a ton of fun and interesting artistic projects to conduct. But now I am proud to share my work even if I know I can improve or if it did not turn out the way I wanted. It’s really important not to hold yourself back in any way as an artist and you will often be surprised who will enjoy what you create even if you don’t yourself and I think it’s worth it to share it anyways. I have found that keeping good record of my work through an online portfolio and blog posts especially helps me see my progression and makes me feel a lot better about my work. With all that being said if you want to check out my current intro video watch it below or check out some of my other videos on my channel.
Honestly, there are not many improvements I would make to this class. I think the most beneficial thing could have been a nongraded or participation only quiz on the first day where we could thoroughly rank our skills and how comfortable we are w/ certain programs and platforms. There were some times where a few students would be ahead of others or I think some people could have benefited more from certain areas than others. I think the individual projects were a great way of allowing everyone to work on what they personally felt they would benefit most from.
Overall, I think the class was fun, informative, and really well organized. Like I said the only improvement would be some sort of assessment at the beginning so lessons could be better geared to everyone’s needs and skills all around. I look forward to continuing to apply my skills learned from this course to better improve my online presence and portfolio.
Art Bananas 
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