Throughout this course I became a lot more confident in myself and my ability to do what needs to be done. It was hard at first to have very little guidance on what order to do things or how exactly research should be structured. I was forced to figure out what worked best for me and I surprised myself with how quickly I was able to adjust to the looser guidelines. Throughout the year I learned to advocate for myself and my needs and to not be afraid to tell those around me exactly what I need to be successful. This was something I was never great at before, typically I would just try to adjust and work with what I was given. But because I cared so much about my project and making it look a certain way, I had to do a better job communicating with the capstone teachers as well and my peers and community members to get the most out of every encounter. During interviews I had to learn how to direct people to answer the questions I was most interested in and that would add the most to my project. That meant I had to be assertive and clear about what I needed from people, which was hard to maintain when talking with strangers. 

I also learned to trust myself and my decisions. I was the only person I could rely on to make decisions about my project or my research. I had to determine what was best for me and my project and trust that it was the right thing to do even if it was challenging. I learned that I am used to sitting back and letting other people make decisions when I think they have more expertise than me. When I volunteered with organizations in the community,  I used to just do what I was told without asking questions because I just wanted to be helpful. But I learned that I can get a lot more out of these interactions by asking questions or recommending changes to processes that aren't as efficient as they could be. 

Overall I became a lot more confident and assertive and I feel a lot more comfortable communicating my needs, ideas, and recommendations. If I were to go through this process again,  I would have trusted myself more in the very beginning of the year when I first committed to my topic and wanted to jump right in. I knew that creating a documentary would be a lengthy process and was worried about running out of editing time. I wanted to get right out in the community and start filming but I was scared to step outside the recommended structure of the course that focused on gathering background research for the first few months. I think if I had trusted my gut and just started filming earlier I could have learned more by being hands on and involved in the community rather than sitting at my computer. Filming interviews and background footage around Syracuse ended up leading me to revelations that guided my project most. I think jumping into that process sooner would have produced even greater results and given me more time to edit and  expand upon my final project. 

I had to push myself out of my comfort zone a lot for this project. The first major challenge I faced was the dread of cold calling people I've never met. There is something about picking up a phone and talking to someone who knows nothing about me or what I'm trying to accomplish that is extremely intimidating. Unfortunately,  emailing wasn't efficient enough and I was forced to make plenty of calls. I overcame my hesitation by writing out simple scripts for each call. I wrote down how I would introduce myself and what I wanted to get out of the call. Thai helped me stay on track and feel less pressure to say the right thing and not embarrass myself. 

Over the course of the year I became a lot more comfortable at making phone calls and now I could do it without a second thought. Similarly I found interviewing people to be pretty challenging at times. Due to the maturity of my project,  I wanted to get very raw and honest interviews which meant asking personal questions of people I barely knew. I would always get nervous going into an interview that I would offend the person or cross a line. I did my best to plan out questions well in advance and to read the situation as we held the interview. As I did more and more interviews, I got more comfortable going with the flow and asking follow up questions, I also became a better judge of when it was best to omit certain questions or come up with new ones when people were not reacting well or giving the kind of responses I was looking for. 

The most challenging part of this process was editing such a long piece of media. My documentary ended up being 30 minutes long, but in its unedited form I had hours of footage. I knew going into this that editing would be the most time consuming and stressful part of the project, and I was definitely correct. I spent hours picking which footage to use, how to organize everything, what music to use, and what themes I wanted to extract. I was also adjusting to a new editing software that I hadn't had much experience with. I learned as I went and I adjusted my expectations when things were just not going to work out exactly how I originally wanted. After hours of cutting clips, organizing my timeline, narrating, adding text, transition, and special effects here and there, I finally produced something I'm proud of. It's not perfect and a big part of the challenge was accepting that I didn't have the time or resources to make a perfect high quality documentary. But it gets the job done and displays my findings in a creative and interesting way. 

Originally my project revolved around the COVID-19 Pandemic and how that impacted local homelessness. I figured that I could find a lot of information about how housing-insecurity has increased as people lost their jobs during the pandemic. At first I did find a good amount of information online in my preliminary research, but I wanted to focus more on human experience than just meaningless statistics. 

When I started talking with community members about their experiences it turned out COVID hadn't had a huge impact on the majority of people I interviewed. I still wanted to feature the pandemic in my project because it's  still relevant even if some community members had not felt affected by it, so I broadened my scope to look at how housing insecurity has changed in recent years regardless of the influence of Covid. I expanded my project further after conducting interviews at the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA). After interviewing three residents and one staff member/resident, I found a common thread of therapy having been mentioned as something that helped them through their struggle with housing-insecurity. I decided to explore this deeper and expand my project to include Therapy as a possible ‘treatment’ for the homeless community. 

I ended up bringing everything together to create a documentary that focuses on the housing crisis through the pandemic, therapy as a tool to reduce homelessness, breaking down the stigma around housing-insecurity, and finishing with a message of hope for those who are struggling.