The hardest part for me is working on explaining myself to anyone. So compiling many aspects that describes my professional story could be difficult. One main goal of this website is to appeal to potential employers when I graduate from College. I do not consider myself a very complex human being, but one thing is for certain I am obsessed with media! I hope something like that can be my saving grace, as I think of myself very knowledgeable on that topic. Also regardless of potential employers viewing my site. I’d hope the blog posts I have on here attract a more diverse audience, that my general audience that views my site and comes across my professional tale see who I am beyond the computer screen. I think that a site like this will serve a a general part of my digital portfolio.
In my short time at Onondaga Community College, I learned a lot from the many professors I had when it comes to design. Employing the techniques I gathered from my web design courses aided a lot when designing my site to the public. My professors were very vocal about visual hierarchy. The overall look of my website is very simplistic, especially for the theme of the site. Sure it is important to be visually appealing, but it also helps that it is organized. My menus pertain to the many categories of my blog posts, while my homepage will have all my blog posts listed starting with the most recent. I also included an ‘about me‘ page, which is important for anyone to know who is creating this content. Although a page dedicated to information about me, I decided to keep it brief, and discuss main points of who I am, and the theme of the site. On the bottom of the page, I included my professional story, that provides a more in-depth look in my background.
Having something such as a professional story, involves a lot of thought. I began by outlining, so I have a visual aid in what I wanted to be included. This is different than say doing a research paper on a selected topic, I was doing research on myself. I began with going through all my past assignments. Picking out what I considered to be the best of my work thus far. Narrowing it down to a few select video projects I worked on in the past. Luckily, my video and audio professors drilled into my head about file management. So searching through my portfolio was not too difficult, which made the process easier. Next I wanted to record a podcast, although very brief, it gives a sense of voice and tone to the readers of my story. Recording that was very difficult for me. To me it felt awkward just basically talking to myself, it took several takes. I am not at the stage yet of being comfortable with my voice and diction because I am one of those many people who hate hearing their voice being recorded. But working with that aspect of production, I need to get more used to it. But I would hope I can be afforded more opportunities to work on that part of myself. During the recording process, I did take several behind the scenes pictures of my recording set up.
With telling my professional story including all these elements of integrated media all at once is a lot to include. Usually when creating media, I typically focus on one aspect at a time. The only new aspect for this story was my podcast. I think all these aspects are super helpful with backing up on what type of person I am. No matter what profession, whether it is architecture, or art, a portfolio is necessary to show employers what you did in the past. It shows them what you are capable of. I consider my portfolio very vast with many different elements of media included, and I think it is necessary in this day in age to be familiar with as many methods of media creation as possible. I consider myself very lucky to take hand in the many different methods of production of media and to be familiar at least with many formats.
The basis of my site as it says in my url is being informal. I say this because the world of media can be very stiff, especially in this current societal climate. For myself as a person I tend to not take life seriously because I do not want to put the mode of my day to day life in a constricted box. My post about RuPaul, can prove that. Although there are times when it is necessary to be formal in a sense, such as school or work. But when I am with friends, or family, just having casual informal conversation is the best. With this in mind, creating content for my website I want it to be informal in a sense, by hopefully including clever hooks. When it pertains to my story, I opened about being only 21, and having all this experience at my age. Something like that is not common for someone my age. Being very close to the end of my undergrad career, it is nice to not scramble as much putting together a portfolio. I have been steadily compiling it, and organizing it so when the time comes, it will not be a dubious process. For the most part, having that aspect done with room for growth eases anxiety a bit.
Overall working on this project of my professional story, in a sense made me think a lot of myself. I do not often go back and see all the work I done. It was nice to see growth in my work. I never did any production work or was a part of a club that did that in High School, so when I started in college, I was very fresh to that experience. I would not change that for anything else in the world.
