Gathering Ideas
As week 1 came to a close, I was left with the brainstorm I initially came up with on day 1. Using this brainstorm, I can think about the themes I want to research in depth. But by the end of the day, I was deeply interested with these topics:
*Later on, I changed 19th century plastic surgery for Parisian catacombs, but I still did research on both!
During the weekend, I worked quickly to provide a presentation as I thought we were presenting ideas on Monday. However, I got the dates mixed up. The day of the presentation will be on Monday of week 3. This gave me enough time to research my topics in more depth.
In class, the first thing we did was think of advice we would give ourselves from a year ago today, to give to the year 2s.
A year ago today, I didn’t think that time would fly by so fast. But by the time December came, that was already half the academic year gone. If I was a year 2 again, I would think about my future more seriously. I regret not setting up a portfolio over the summer and apply for internships when it was available. The fear of change was all consuming, and instead of doing something about it, I instead stayed curled up in a ball- stagnant on my bed. I would greatly advise students from year 2 if they’re afraid of getting into the industry, to talk to professionals about it, and more importantly, tutors and other resources given to us by the uni.
After this exercise, we moved on and told the class the possible research topics we would be looking into.
Then with one of the topics we had written down, we did a task where we were given categories and with the topic we had, we needed to think about what relates to the category.
For example, in the characters category, I wrote down Sarah Good as she was one of the first women who was hanged for accused witch craft in the Salem Witch Trials in 1692.
After the task above, we looked into systems, starting off with systems of a moustache. Some of the systems of a moustache include:
- Grooming
- Trimming
- Bacteria (if you don’t wash it)
- History
- Culture
Then we thought about systems in our topics. For this task, I was paired up with E-jay and Indy
What is a game system and a component?
A game system is made of many different components, where as a component is only one thing. To simplify terms, our digestive system is it’s own system. However, your organ the intestines, is only one component of the entire system.
Block Out Poetry
In this task, we were given sheets about real life crises. With this sheet we would do block out poetry. I had a hard time doing this task as I’m not really the poetic type, nor am I that interested about the topic. Nevertheless, I still came up with a poem.
I quickly skimmed this extract and it was about the ocean and how it’s being ruined by humans. The Ocean has always been a topic of interest to me as it’s something that means so much to me as someone who had grown up next to the ocean in The Philippines at one point in my life. Reading this extract made me quite sad knowing that we are actively killing something so precious to me.
I was quite stuck but in the end, I came up with a short poem. It reads:
Oceans are our planet’s life support
The world’s ecosystem
Containing untapped potential for discovery
Decades of irresponsible exploitation have led to levels of degredation
Efforts to protect the Ocean is not meeting the urgent need to safe guard
Rooted in tragedy.
Thoughts and takeaways:
This week, it’s starting to show that I am beginning to take shape in what I am interested in. By the end of this week, I had a brainstorm forming, I realised the deadlines forming, and how much this could stress me out if I do not pace myself well at all. This being said, I still would prefer to have a work and social life balance as to not feel burnt out from the sheer amount of work. To avoid this happening, I will just make notes in my take aways of what I should expect to do for the current week in preparation.
Block out poetry was a very difficult task for me, but I found it meaningful. Even though poetry isn’t one of my strongest skills, I found it interesting to indulge in this task.
For this week:
- Start doing some research on my 4 topics of interest
- Since I have a hard time to maintain focus, look at videos if I have the chance.
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