Research & Projects

Project 1

A letter to Lucy

Overview

This Project was focused on writing a personal and meaningful piece for the audience. The piece had to affect a curtain emotion. I chose the emotion love, and the main aim of the piece was to show the idea of love and what it meant to you

A letter to Lucy

I remember the date, September 28th 2002. I was left at nanny’s. I waved and smiled as mum and dad drove to the hospital. The excitement and happiness of knowing what was about to happen. I was about to have a little sister, not that I knew that at the time. Six days later you came home. I remember holding you for the first time. You were so small, so adorable, and so perfect. Our family felt complete.

It was the first week of December, we were on the Santa Express. The day was perfect… then it happened. I never realised what was going on, mum was in shock and dad had called 999. I was confused and felt lost within the whole situation. Little did I know, this was the first time I had ever seen a seizure.

This Christmas was not like other Christmas’s. We spent it in Hospital, I was only allowed in a few times a day ( I missed you so much). I think Mum and Dad were worried I’d be scared from seeing all the tests you were having done.

I remember being back at nanny’s. Dad came to pick me up, you were in the car. He broke the news to me. They were confusing words, one I had never heard before. It was called Aicardi Syndrome, A severe form of Brain damage. I’m not sure I truly understood the severity of your condition at the time. I asked dad “can the doctors help fix Lucy?”. He didn’t need to say anything, the tear rolling down his face was enough.

I remember when the severity of your condition hit me. It came in the form of a number, it was just one number…Six. This was the number of years we were told you were expected to live. The tears rolled down my face. The sadness I felt that day will never be forgotten, it was like someone had reached into my heart and ripped it out.

Mum cried often, her life had changed. She was about to have her little girl, a girl to go horse riding with, a girl to go shopping with. It had been ripped away from her. The life she imagined had vanished.

We were no longer a normal family. Winters were spent in hospital, summers were spent at home. The emotions we felt those first few years of your life were very difficult. We were adapting. And yet with all this sadness all I could do was love you.

As the years went by, I spent more and more time with nanny. She always looked after me while you were sick (It was normally around winter time). The days were long but the hours I got to spend with you in hospital flew by. I bought you teddy bears to cuddle up with, I read you stories and always told you how my day at school was. Someone during these terrifying times you always bought out the best in me.

Sam was born 12 days after your 3rd Birthday. As he grew up he didn’t truly understand what was wrong. Why would he, he was just an infant. However his love for you was everlasting.

We became inseparable, Some of our best childhood memories was spending time with you, Just the three of us. We built dens to lay in with us. Always put on Disney movies and played with your cuddly toys.

Some days were harder than others. I remember times when I was playing football and you all would leave east half-time to make sure you were okay — the rain was never very good for you.

School was hard, sometimes I just couldn’t concentrate, I was worrying about you.

For some people a cold is a few days off, some soup and rest. For you a cold could be life threatening. I think of a time when I was 13, me and sam were at home and you were back in hospital. The worry we felt was unbearable. You had gone in with a high temperature (normally nothing to worry about) and yet that evening we were told there was a 50/50 chance you’d make it through the night.

As our family adapted to the life we had been giving, the more things changed around the house. Your bedroom was moved downstairs. The doorways were made wider, there was a hoist put into our living room, too help mum or dad lift you out of your seat. Even the van was adapted we had a lift on our first car and then a ramp put into our next one. It was not just physical adaptions we made, we also had to deal with adapting to mental thoughts. We learnt to block out the all the staring as we pushed you down the street, we learnt to ignore all the questions, we blocked out all the weird looks. We didn’t care about them we had you, and you had us.

As more years passed and medicine improved that number six slowly slips away to the back of my mind. I remember you 18th Birthday, It was a day we thought would never come. We had all my friends, all our family and other close family friends come over to celebrate you. I’d flown home from my freshman year of college to come see you. Even though you couldn’t say it, I could tell you were so happy to see me, Mum was crying, but these were happy tears, tears of joy and tears of love.

Some of our best memories together came from our vacations. When I flew down to Florida and met you all a year ago, we had the best time. We went to Disney, we spent so much time in the sun and listened to music outside in the pool.

You’ve changed our life, we closer together because of you, we love each other more because of you and we’re stronger because of you.

Now You’re 21 and even though we don’t know the time we have left, all we want you to know is how much we all love and care for you. I want to say Thank You for all the love you’ve given us.

You will always be our special Girl.

Reflective Piece for Project 1

I decided to choose my “letter to Lucy” as my first writing sample as I find it is one of my favourite pieces I have composed throughout my time at Boise State. It is a very meaningful piece that can inflect many emotions on the people that read it, but most importantly, it means a lot to me. It was an opportunity for me to write about someone I truly cared about and missed. One of my favourite things about literature is that it allows you to write down your emotions and express feelings that can be hard to express when you say them out loud. This piece I wrote allowed me to express exactly how I felt about growing up with someone who has a disability and how important it was for me to show her that I didn’t care about the disability and that I will love her no matter what. I thought this was one of my

After re-reading my piece of Lucy, there were several areas I liked and then areas I thought needed work. One of the areas that I thought needed work were, punctual and others that were length based. One of the key parts of the letter to start with, was to focus on length and making sure my paragraphs were not too long. The idea of having smaller paragraphs was to make the lines more meaningful and more effective when sending their message. Having too long paragraphs can take that away from the situation and the message can be lost within the lines of the writing.

One of the major changes I made to my piece was to focus on the ending. My first pice focused on the ending as more of a story rather than a letter. I found that this lost its way and the ending could not be as effective as I thought it could have been. So I decided to change the ending. I tried to make the ending of the letter more like a conversation and a release of emotion. I think doing this allows the audience to truly get the emotion of

When I was first given feedback on my piece, I had a strong argument to use more of my moms emotions when writing the letter as it gave more feedback and emotional about the impacts the situation and on my whole family. I eventually voted against this as it took away for the personal impact of the letter. I felt like the best way to do this would be to write my moms story separately as it meant I could give more emotion and detail about her, instead of taking away from Lucys story itself.

Overall,I didn’t want to make too many changes to this piece, I just wanted to add in small bits of detail that made the story/letter more effective to suit my narrative and goal of the piece. I think the little bits I added in made the piece a lot more effective and lead to having a bigger impact on the reader. It installed more emotion to the piece and lead to a greater sense of personalisation in the letter that was written for my sister. The changes in the ending of the letter added more stability to the ending and made the end more clear rather than leaving the reader unsure of whether the ending was an ending. Finally the overall grammar of the piece was checked up on and corrected correctly. There are curtain pieces of language used to help make the piece more like a letter and more personally, which once again helps with the idea of making the piece as personal as possible.

Project 2 (original)

Overview

The Idea of this project was to create a logo for a company that we had created. It was for a class in Innovation and design, I then used the logo on several different websites and instagram tags to see what it would look like in that form of environment.

Revised Logos and name for project Two

Our new Logo

Fintess posters that will be up and around campus

Instagram story advertisments for one of our yoga classes

My Buissness card

The idea of the Logos are to show strength and power for college students. The idea of standing on knowledge symbolises the power we get from university and how important knowledge is for us when lifting us up. The arms stemming into branches symbolises what we can grow into and to grow we need to be healthy. The stars coincide with this as our imagination and how important it is for us to have a healthy mind and imagination. One of the key symbols to me for imagination is that stars and dreaming of the life that is our there for us. Finally the colours represent where we come from. The idea of UniMind, came from Boise and Boise is known for its blue and orange, therefore i thought it would only be right to have the colours for this company as blue and orange.

Full Revision of Project 2

In this project I had to create a Logo/image that can be used for a company I was creating. The company Ic created was called Funky Fitness and focused on a website/platform that encourage new students to go workout and get there exercise in. It was created so that all areas of fitness and college life could come together. The app would involve mental health opportunities, a page where you can meet new people and scheduling to help organising your busy college day.

After going over everything and getting a lot of feedback I found two areas of the project which needed substantial reworking and that was the Logo and the Name. The name sounded to childish and not catchy enough. It sounded like something a five year old could say. And for me the Logo was just too bland. It was black and white, had a slogan across the top it and was not very appealing tot he audience. For me to make this an effective business I would need to change the logo and make it a lot more eye catching to help persuade people to coming and using my app over someone else’s. Having a catchy and effective name will also help this part of the business and create more customers for the app.

The first area I focused on when recreating the Logo and name was the name of the Business. I felt like once I had a name it would be a lot easier to focus on the rest of the Logo and create that based on what I have got already. The process of this was relatively easy. In this class we are told a lot to use artificial intelligence to problem solve. So the first thing I would ask is “give me fifteen new fitness company names”. From the results I got I would then enhance the questions, “give me fifteen fitness company names based on people who go to university”. The process goes on, specifically focusing on areas I would want my name of the Business to be based on, college, students, fitness, mental health, etc. After a lot of thought, I eventually came to the name “UniMind Fitness: Strengthening minds, Empowering bodies”.

The next step was the logo, for this I wanted to look into something that represented, togetherness, growth and education, while implementing fitness. I eventually ended up with the logo you can see here. The main aim for this was the person being the main symbol. The body is stood onto of a book which represents the strength and power of knowledge. Key for us with our target audience being within education. The next key part of the log is the branches stemming from the arms of the body. The branches represent the power and strength of tree along with the growth you experience through college. The branches are free to grow through our journey at college. The final part of the logo which is key are the stars coming of the branches and acting as leaves. I didn’t want to use leaves because they eventually fall to the ground symbolising an end of an era, while using stars allows us to show something that will live forever. Furthermore the idea of stars come from imagination, we are always told to shoot for the stars when trying to reach our goals and this is what we want our clients to do. The idea of the starts being bright and colourful also represent a healthy imagination, another key part of our goals as a business.

Overall, I felt like the revision of the logo and name of the business was very effective. I feel like the Business now has a new meaning and can be more meaningful to our clients. The logo itself, now represents our goals of the Business instead of just being there as an image. I also feel like the name of the Business now has more catchy name which gives more subtle details of what we want as a company. It sounds a lot better than “Funky Fitness”, and can be used as a symbol rather than just a few words out together.

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