Course Reflections

Intermediate Photography

I took this course the first semester of my sophomore year. This course focused on a portfolio of images that truly represented something of our choosing that represented ourselves. Before the course began, I underwent a traumatizing experience of loosing my house to water damage, therefore this course helped me on more than just an artistic level, it helped me on a personal level as well. Prior to this course, I have never worked on a project devoted to the entire semester, therefore I found it quite challenging to conceptualize all of the work that was put into the semester in a couple of images. I like to view this course as a journey and I really enjoyed how the images that I took reflected me as a photographer and what that meant for myself as an individual. My main takeaways from this course was the relationship that an artist has with their artwork as well as time management on a project.

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Media & Society

I also took this course my sophomore year. This course examines as the title states, the relationship between “media and society.” It examines different forms of media, for example TV shows, magazines, and films from a sociological perspective.

On a personal level, this course opened my eyes to how I view different forms of media as stated above. It taught me that often overlooked, everyday life advertisements are portraying a narrative that can be racist, sexist and even homophobic. When the discussion of music videos and rapping came up, I gained a new perspective about the sexual objectification of women. My main takeaway from this class was to question the “normal” everyday parts of media portrayal as it allowed me to examine my own media consumption in a different way.

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Advanced Writing: Digital Controversies

This course explored the writing process in depth. WordPress.com was introduced and I was also able to discuss and write with the help of my classmates.

It sounds quite simple, but I discovered skills in analyzing my own writing that I never thought about. Something as simple as making sure that the topic sentence of a paragraph sets up the rest of the paragraph is something that I have learned from Advanced writing. I also learned the skill of explaining and mapping out the topic that I was planning on writing about. This course also changed my perception about the relationship that writing has to the media. Writing just like any art form, adapts to its cultural surroundings. Therefore, as different technological mediums become a popular part of society, writing adapts to the specific mediums. For the final project, I learned how to transform a written argument into a video, ultimately being able to tell a story through two different mediums, text and video.

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