Collaboration & Shared Leadership

I believe that these are two sides of the same coin. Collaboration is where you work with someone or a whole group in order to accomplish a task. Shared Leadership is where you put a specific focus on the strengths of all in your group as they take charge on different parts of a project. This graphic I created to the left helps showcase my understanding of the topic.

Throughout my college education, I have had to work with groups in many situations and in many different types of classes. These can range from miscellaneous types of daily work to large scale group projects. Such types of variations include essays, websites, podcasts, app mockups, presentations, and journalistic articles.

One of my most important group roles was an article that I had previously worked on for the campus paper, The Husky Herald. When in that group, I had to follow all of these tenets that I have listed out here in order for our group to be able to ensure the article we wrote was done successfully.

At the time the article was written, we were still transitioning into doing in class work coming out of the other side of the pandemic. Communication during and after class was key so that we all could properly establish roles, determine what parts of our article we wanted to work that aligned best with our strengths, and hold each other accountable towards the work that we wanted to have completed. Each of had a focus topic for our article where we had to do extensive research on the subject, write a report on what we found, and conduct an interview with an expert on the subject. Even though not everything we found was used in the article, the collaborative effort towards research and information gathering allowed us to create the best article possible.

Critical & Creative Thinking

It is important to understand using your ability to think both logically analytically, but also being imaginative in being able to present your thinking as well. Different chains of thought come together in order to create a whole. I either do dedicated research to write an argument or utilize alternative methods in order to display my point in an appealing and convincing manner. This graphic I made is a representation of that line of thinking. While I believe I have always been more analytical in my line of thinking when to comes to my work and research capabilities, I also do what I can to try different approaches in presenting my work, such as through presentations, videos, podcasts, and music playlist creations.

The ability to change approaches as expand the scope of my thinking is something that I like to do throughout my work. One of my favorite instances of creative thinking was when I constructed a playlist themed around the book "There, There". I had created various media playlists for UWave Radio before, themed around things such as workout music. But for this project, I wanted to choose a song that I believe best represented each character in the book and have it be part of the playlist. It was an interesting spin on a project that I enjoyed doing as it allowed me to think about each of the characters in a different way.

Diversity & Equity

It is important to be able to reflect on various cultures and become more socially conscious about them. Throughout my college career, I have had various experiences where I have had to utilize research and knowledge to understand the experiences of marginalized groups and be able to work within them. This graphic I created showcases some topics I have had to look at in my various classes. My work is used to foster greater equity amongst these groups and develop the confidence to identify with them. This includes various essays and presentations I have done based around disadvantages that various people in marginalized and minority communities have had to live with while also presenting various potential solutions to those problems.

Being from a biracial family, the topic of diversity and equity is something that I have had to implement into some of my work throughout my college career. One of my best examples of this was when I looked into the importance of Native American Identity in one of my essays. Over the years, those of Native descent have experienced forms of oppression that contribute to the suppression of their identity and culture. These have come through various types of stereotypical imagery, public speech, and through various political policies throughout history. Understanding various mistakes from the past is an important part of being able to properly assess diversity today and apply a greater understanding of it to yourself.

Interdisciplinary Research & Inquiry

The ability to conduct proper research is an important quality. It is a skill that can apply to various occupations. This graphic that I created mentions some of the key points of research that I believe have been the most important over my college education. This includes the ability to formulate an argument, have a guiding research question, understand that research allows you to develop a full understanding of a topic, and ensure any sources you find are reliable and accurate so that you can abide by any ethical standards in your research.

Many people I know consider the act of research and searching for sources to be a very annoying process, but I personally find it to be very easy and sometimes enjoyable when I am able to find a good article or scholarly source. This is especially when the topic I am researching piques my interest. One of my favorite instances of conducting research was in an assignment where I had to act as a technology ethics commission and create a guideline of laws related to that of disembodied minds, or in other words, people who have forsaken their bodies to upload their minds into a computer program. I essentially had to make a determination as to what a 'disembodied mind' would and would not be able to do. My research included looking at multiple scholarly articles related to the ethics of mind uploading and the applications of artificial intelligence, and looking into actual international law. Due to the fact that I was writing as if I was the voice of an ethics committee, I had to make sure I followed the multiple tenets I listed on the graphic in order to maintain the credibility of my writing.

Writing & Communication

Always make sure that you can clearly state your point. That is one of the key tenets of writing and communication. Similar to critical and creative thinking, you must be adept at presenting your point or argument in different ways. In a way, I find it a culmination of many of these representing skills as writing & communication is how you are going to be able to show your expertise in all of them in whatever method you want to utilize.

Writing has seemingly been something that tends to come across naturally for me, always scoring high marks on reports and essays that I do. I do tend to also enjoy when I am able to communicate a point or argument through different mediums as well. This poster I created went in hand with a report I wrote on Lenovo as well. For the project, I had to utilize both written and visual communication to express all of the information I found as I was researching the company. This included research into the companies' historical background, corporate structure, economic structure, and other general information in order to make a determination about its position in the technology market.

Creating Ethical Media for Various Purposes

Within my major, I have had to apply media and communication scholarship to the processes of producing ethical media and communication content in a variety of contexts and for a range of purposes. I of course have had to apply these skills in various ways whether it was writing, the creation of various presentations, graphic design, video, or radio.

In the second half of my college career, once I settled on my major, I wanted to do something that expanded my repertoire beyond just writing. One of the primary ways in which I have done this is through radio and playlist creation. I have done this through our campus radio station, UWave Radio. I have worked with them in several of my classes. This includes creating several playlists for them to have in the library that have a form of graphic design accompanying them for advertising purposes. For another class, I had to host a weekly radio show that included creating themed playlists and doing interviews with guests over 30-minute blocks.

Analyze the Role, History, and Rules of Media and Communication Technolgy in Society

Throughout my major, I have also had to analyze where the media and our technology today both fit into and affect our society. This has been work primarily done in essay formats, but I have also had to showcase this through graphic design and podcast creation as well.

One common thing I looked at throughout not just my major, but dating back to high school as well, was how misinformation and disinformation affect our society. With how prominent this topic became starting back in 2016, I wanted to learn everything I possibly could about it. When the opportunity to talk about this or write an essay came up in my classes, I jumped at the opportunity to base my assignment around it. One assignment I did most recently while in my major was a podcast episode on the subject called "The Falsehoods of Today". Up to this point, I had never done anything resembling a podcast before, so it was nice to present my findings on the subject in a different medium and expand my abilities past just writing.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse