Critical Reflection Essay
This project has been a very fun journey from beginning to end. I knew from the beginning what my topic was but my research molded what I wanted to report on throughout the entire project. I turned in all of my assignments in on time and with great effort to follow the directions because of my dedication and desire to have the best project that I could do. I enjoyed tying in sustainability, the need to use efficient and practical techniques so that the future generations do not have to find a new way to do something, with fieldwork, the process of going out to a field to work on research, to find out why people collect movies.
I began this project by choosing a topic. I quickly knew that I wanted to talk about movie collecting because I had just become a collector myself a month before the first class. I then began to brainstorm different questions that I wanted to explore. Some of the questions that I thought about researching was “How do stores such as Ed Mckay’s run a successful business when everything is so inexpensive?”, and “What makes a movie collector collect?”. After that I began to write up questions for potential interviewees and started to search for people that I could interview. Luckily I am gifted with being a part of a residential college of which I have someone with one of the most impressive collections that I have seen. I mostly interviewed with him but I also interviewed someone who moderates a forum for movie collectors on Reddit.com. I conducted the interviews and had a lot of fun doing them. I got to get a much better idea on how to make my own collection better and better strategies in making a good collection. Once I had all of my questions answered I went out to a fieldworking site and observed. I went to Ed Mckay’s Used Bookstore on Battleground Avenue and got some pretty interesting observations and theories about some of the people but I did not learn as much as I did with the interviews. I think that the best method for field working for me was definitely the interviews. I very much liked that I was able to interact with people and learn more about the topic than when I was sitting in the corner of the store watching people. Being able to interact and respond to the interviewees was fun to do and it allowed me to think up new questions. Lastly, having an interview allowed my research to be conversational in the sense that I could jump around on my questions and put in my own experiences when interviewing. Once I had all of that done I was ready to write my first draft of my paper essay.
The first thing I did when doing my paper was to outline. I used to be able to just sit down and vomit out a paper but now I can’t do that for the life of me. No matter how vague the outline is, I still need an outline. My outline is usually vague on purpose because I want to have room to adjust and to not feel constrained by my outline. I am a writer outside of school and I like to keep my outlines vague because then the story will naturally grow but I have to outline major points. For this paper though I just allocated a certain amount of pages to each thing that I wanted to touch on such as the interviews, observations, my history with movie collecting and my conclusion of which I tied everything together. I like my writing process because I have a lot of freedom to write about what I want in my papers but I still put up goals and details that I want to touch on so it keeps me accountable and makes sure that I am doing the assignment correctly. I do not have many weaknesses except sometimes I find that I have to fluff up my writing because I like to be direct instead of making everything wordy. Some strengths that I do have as a writer is that I can write pretty consistently in terms of speed and I find that I am getting better as a writer every year when I do the National Novel Writing Month because of how rigorous and challenging it is to do a 50k word novel in a single month. Being in this class has strengthened my writing and has helped me become more involved with my residence hall and Strong College.
The most important part of my experience at Strong College is the friendships that I have made. I have gotten pretty close with many people in Strong College but mostly with people that I have been involved in Hall Council with my first year. For my second year first semester I wanted a break to focus on schoolwork and found that I missed my time being with other people and working out what we should do for the hall later on. Now I am the Cult Movie Night chair and I host screenings of cult films on the weekend for those who were staying here. I made that position because I wanted to share my favorite movies and discover new movies with people that I lived with in the same building and because the hall did not have many options for people on what they could do over the weekend. The work that I have done for that is what I am most proud of because I always found myself dreading the coming weekend because I rarely had anything to do but now I have made an option for residents of Strong College to choose to spend their time on the weekend.
The one thing that I would change with my experiences is how involved I was in the residence life. I held a position and was pretty involved my first year but my second year I was much more lazy in my involvement in the residence hall. I would also like to change the way that I attended the events because usually I would sit in the back and not socialize with anyone at Tea Time or Movie Night or anything else that was about being social. I would like to think that it would be easy for me to change but I have always had trouble with putting myself out there in terms of participating in events and gatherings.
Committee Fieldwork
I am the Cult Movie Night chair of Strong College for the Spring of 2017. I host movie screenings of unknown movies that most people have never heard of. Some movies that I have shown were Killer Condom, Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror, and Train to Busan. I believe that my most meaningful part of the committee was being able to share my interests and expose people to a more niche part of the film industry because there are so many movies out there but people tend to watch movies that they know will be good such as the remakes, sequels, and so on so they end up not giving the less well-known movies a shot and I get to help those movies get the attention that they deserve. I chose this committee because I created it and have done more work in this committee than when I was Program Chair for the 2015-2016 school year. If I could do it again, I would change the day of which we watch the movies to Friday night instead of Saturday because a lot of people stay Friday nights but most people who remain here on Saturday night go do their own thing with their friends and family than on Friday night.
One of the methods that I used to collect data was observations. I chose this method because it would be the easiest way for me to see what kind of effect my committee work has on people. When I was watching a movie with a few of the people in Strong and Ashby, I was also seeing how they reacted and watched what they were doing throughout the movie. We were watching Killer Condom and there was only about 3 of us, the most we’ve had at a Cult Movie Night, so it was easy to take note of the general opinion and what triggered a reaction. I saw that the more ridiculous the scene the more that the others would comment or laugh about it than scenes where it was just dialogue. When the Killer Condom first came onto the screen, the two others would snapchat or take a picture of it and share it with their friends. Overall the night was a lot of fun and everyone was happy that we had made Mac and Cheese because it was around dinner time and everyone was hungry.