Final Digital Media + Design Post

For the next two years, I want to become more familiar with applications like Cinema 4D and After Effects so I can explore the field of visual effects. I want to pursue projects in my personal time because I’m interested in doing them, not because I’m being graded for them.

GC/CoB has helped prepare me for the real world. Through Digital Media and Design, our professor is a professional so we can see some of the work he creates and his workflow. We’ve gotten to hear from and speak to a number of professionals through the digital industry from social media pros to company execs which has opened my eyes to how many paths you can take in your career and how important connections are.

Relative to where I’d like to be, I need to be creating more outside of class and organizations. I need to be creating things just because I want to create. I need to be learning things just because I want to learn them. To do so, I need to work on my time management, my biggest weakness. I need to cut down on my commitments so I can spend more time on personal projects.

Throughout Digital Media and Design, I got to work on a variety of skills from sticker design to video editing. Throughout this semester, I’ve also made time to work on projects outside of class. In fact, I spent most of my time this semester on projects unaffiliated with my classes – extracurricular organizations and group initiatives have taken a priority. And I’ve learned a lot from those endeavors.

I used to track my to-do tasks in Google Keep in different notes categorized by classes or organizations or life and then even further broken down into which class or which event or how urgent of a task. When I was doing that, I found that I lost track of things pretty easily. Two weeks ago, I started keeping a single, written list of all my tasks and marking them off there when done. I found it much more effective. It was very visually helpful to see everything I needed to do in one place. It’s also very satisfying to mark something off a physical list.

Though working on more projects and building my skillset there would personally benefit me very much, I also need to consider my career and have a public portfolio of that work and those skills. I have a very rudimentary website that’s not well-coded or completed and I don’t have all my projects on there either. Though often having a minimal viable product works well, I want my portfolio to be something I’m very proud of and very not minimal.