End-of-Year Reflection

Throughout my four years in e-Comm, here's one valuable takeaway I've gained from each of the five guarantees:

Technology: Especially during my junior and senior years, I have expanded my knowledge of technical skills exponentially. I have continued to improve with Illustrator and Final Cut, I have learned how to use After Effects to create a variety of motion graphics, and I have began to do some editing in Premiere (although I still greatly prefer Final Cut over Premiere).

For some examples of the technical skills I've gained, I'd point out a few projects that I completed over this school year.



This animated state gymnastics poster required use of Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects, as I had many moving components, along with both vector and image components. Click here for a more detailed description.



For basketball season, I created player intros and graphics for both our live broadcasts on YouTube and in-game on our video board. I utilized Illustrator, Final Cut, and After Effects. Click here to see all of the graphics I created for basketball.

Collaboration: An example of collaboration would be when I worked with Yearbook to find photos to use for the senior farewell video. The photos were a great addition to the video, and I was glad that Yearbook was willing to share some of their photos with me. One of the things I wish e-Comm did more of would be to work with other strands. We hardly ever have contact with graphic design, web design, or entertainment, and I think it would be a strong characteristic of the academy if we started working together more.

Communication: Communicating between students in Convergence is important, as creating Raven Minute (and especially ONW Now) requires the efforts of many people. While I think our communication improved over the last two years, for me personally, I still don't think I did a good enough job of communicating as I could have.

Project Management: Overall, I thought I did well with project management. I worked on many projects outside of class, including the basketball graphics, the L3 promo video over the summer, and the senior farewell video. Although the basketball player intros took longer than originally anticipated, I was determined to make the finalized designs good quality.

Leadership: Looking back, I do not think I was as good of leader as I could have been. Although we were generally good with getting productions completed in a timely manner, I sometimes lost my temper, which shouldn't generally happen with someone in a leadership role.

Overall, I have learned a lot this year in e-Comm. I have gained many technical skills, and I have had many opportunities to work on many projects involving animation, editing, and graphics. I am looking forward to my next four years at Northwest Missouri State and continuing in mass media!