Self-Evaluation

To be honest, being a senior in college is not easy. And this semester was pretty difficult for me not only because of the harder classes that I take, but also because of the incredibly intense tennis season. Combine those two with my Digital Media Assistant position and you will get an absolutely stressed out Russian girl, who tries to get her life together.

My schedule was killing me the whole semester. Between classes, work, endless practices and traveling I had to meet deadlines and get all the assignments done. It seems like a lot of other students in Portfolio class had similar problems. Even though it was very stressful for me, somehow (have no idea how) I managed to have all the required work done by the due dates.

To be honest, I am not quite satisfied with the way my personal website looks like. I have no experience in the website making and my website seems pretty simple to me. I would like to move it to a different hosting platform, if I only knew how. I need to research that topic. I am pretty sure that I will find the answer if I spend some time looking for it. Also I would like to add some more content that wouldn’t be just about sports. I like taking pictures and some of them look really nice, so I would like to have them on my website. Also I think the showreel of my works will be a good idea, since I want to be a part of the broadcasting world.

Another thing that I need to work on is the final presentation. I have all those good ideas to put together and I really hope that when I’m finished it will look exactly the way I want it to look. My proposal looks good and it could become an interesting topic if I do everything right.

My blog also looks professional and has some solid posts. However, I need to admit that I made a big mistake, the first couple of weeks I did not write anything and didn’t pay that much attention to this blog (even though I should’ve), so later on I had to catch up on it and make up the lost time.

The hardest thing for me throughout this semster was an establishment of my own website. As I already mentioned couple of times, I had no experience of making a website and that was a real struggle for me. I had no idea how to get a domain and establish my website. No one could explain me that or help me with it. So after some time crying and googling, I sort of figured out how to do it, even though I’m still not fully satisfied with the look of my website.

I have turned all the projects and assignments in on time, however, I realize that I still need to work on some things to make it look more professional.

I had no idea how much new stuff I do on a daily basis until I started this blog. It helped me to realize that keeping track of your daily activities can improve the quality of your work because you get to have another look at what you do and analize it after it’s done. The Portfolio establishment taught me a lot of valuable lessons, including how to manage my time and increase my productivity.

As a media professional, I had a lot of problems with my projects and assignments. A lot of times there are major issues that don’t depend on you or your skills. For example, when the camera bugs, or the light kit stops working. As a professional, you have to know how to deal with these kinds of things and quickly fix them. But like I said before, you usually learn from your own mistakes and gain a priceless experience.

Also I would like to mention that I really enjoyed using Medium as a platform for my personal blog. I find it pretty easy and simple to use and to deliver the thoughts that I want to share with my followers. I think that the simple layout and editor are the advantages of the Medium. You don’t get overwhelmed with all those themes and fonts that you have to choose from on the other websites. Which means that it doesn’t distruct you from your main goal- quality content.

Also I find Slack pretty cool, because it is simple and it’s very easy to communicate with the others. I communicated successfully with my classmates and the professor via Slack throughout the semester. I also find it really nice that you can create private channels and chat in there. That’s where you can get a constructive feedback and advices from your classmates before your final submission to the professor.

Overall, I find my work satisfactory. I’m proud of myself putting all my works together and being able to show my portfolio to the media professionals.