FIRST PRACTICE ASSESSMENT

Reflective Essay

The Korean Pop Dance Club was founded in 2014 as a social and creative performance club at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD. In 2019 I became the secretary and then was elected the president in 2020 which I held until I graduated in the spring of 2022. The club started very small with around 15 official members. By the time I left the club we had over 70 full time members.

Along with my small admin team, I carried out a variety of tasks and roles such as: dance workshop teacher, project leader, performace director, audio engineer, video editor for youtube videos, digital designer for merchandice and social media, communications leison, counselor, planner, and the club representative for media and university faculty. Thankfully my admin team was very talented and they often mentored me on subjects I was less familiar with like media management, design, video editing etc.

Through this experience I learned so much about design, creative team management, professionalism, as well as how to effectively teach and communicate in group settings. Looking ahead in my future in practice, I hope to continue to develop my design skills under the context of landscape architecutre. I also plan to continue to study more traditional and modern methods of design representation from sketching to modeling to digital software. One way I am planning on improving my design thinking is through a summer job with the Sasaki Foundation as a teaching assistant for their SEED internship program.

Student Information

Student Name: Jillian Ziegler

Degree Program: MLA

Self Assessment

Design Approach: 2 of 4

Collaboration: 4 of 4

Communication: 3 of 4

Technical Skills: 1 of 4

Professional Development: 3 of 4

Project 1

Korean Pop Dance Club (Ganji)

Organization: Korean Pop Dance Club

Mentors: Trisha Shrivastava and Danielle Doan

Type of Project: Volunteer Creative leadership Project

Location: College Park, Maryland, US

My Role on the Project: President, Creative Director, Sound engineer, Video editor, Choreographer, Graphics Designer

Major Competencies, Skills, and Knowledge Learned: Written and oral communication, leadership skills, intercultural knowledge and competence, creative thinking, problem solving, planning and programming, conflict resolution, personal time management, Integrity and professionalism, teamwork and collaboration

Project Description

My final year as president of Ganji/ The Korean Pop Dance Club was filled with highs and lows and countless new experiences. Coming out of the pandemic we were determined to expand our reach and gain the recognition we knew the club and its members deserved.

The four biggest aspects of my final year with Ganji was our first large public workshop which I led, producing youtube videos for the first time, learning to juggle my many roles as the club grew, and designing our first ever merchandise.

Our first event back in person we were approached by the University of Maryland Performing Arts Center on campus to teach a k-pop dance workshop at their big fall event, Art Attack! We had a full 3 hour set to fill so we collaborated with another dance club on campus to teach two workshops and then hold an open dance event at the end. To date this was the largest group I had ever taught choreography to at one time (80+ people) and was a huge learning experience for me both in terms of teaching and planning an event.

At the end of Spring 2021 and beginning of our first semester back (Fall 2021) we began to record performances for our club youtube channel. Typically we would perform at invited invents, but wanted to try recording a performance and playing with editing. I taught myself to use imovie as well as Adobe Premier Pro to edit the footage we filmed. Ths was a really fun challenge and left me interested in continuing to learn about filming and editing video content.

Learning to juggle many different roles and tasks was my biggest struggle in this leadership role. Many of these I had never even done before but I had to learn many new skills and still maintain an air of confidence when leading both my team of admins as well as our club members when I would teach a workshop. From this, I gained a lot of new skills and my teamwork and versatility improved as I managed all these different aspects of Ganji.

The final aspect of my time leading Ganji I want to talk about is the design work that I did for both Logos and club marchandise that we sell for fundraising. The sticker was the first product I officially designed and we sold to raise money for performances and club outings. The sweatchirt began design and production while I was president and just came to fruition in Fall 2022.

My Resume

Page updated

Report abuse