It is hard to express your exact thoughts on things you are passionate about. And, my interest in the Making Media course is not an exception.
I used to have a thought of being isolated and getting nothing but boring lessons when enrolling in this course because I had no contact with anyone else in the room and I did not feel the course fascinating to me at all. However, things changed differently from what I had expected. The teacher - Mr Soumik Parida welcomed us with open arms and created a friendly atmosphere in the classroom. And fortunately, although I am an introverted person by nature, having problems with interpersonal communication and discussing things in the group, I had chances to work with supportive teammates. They just came to me unexpectedly and asked me for being their teammate. And for all of these things, I extremely appreciate the time that I have spent with these great people.
In our first assignment, our team had problems with recording our voice because it was our first time that we’ve created a podcast. Due to that, we received a number of negative comments on our voice in the peer review and I was so disappointed about myself, thinking that I could not meet the assignment requirements including the use of recording devices and voice-adjusting tools. However, something within us told us not to give up but deal with the skills that we lacked and started with a small baby step. As Martin Lurther King Jr. once said: ‘You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step’. Thanks to that optimistic mindset, we decided to give it another try - we recorded another podcast. As a result, while we just received an average score for our podcast, we were still satisfied with what we just did and finally understood the working styles of others.
However, the most challenging assignment in this course was creating the 12-page magazine when we both needed to write the contents as well as design our own photos. We were required to achieve critical thinking and aesthetic intelligence, which made me immensely depressed and lose my confidence. Despite being familiar with tools like Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, I still struggled with making the most of it and had problems with choosing suitable images for our magazine. After all of that, I decided to step out of my introverted zone to ask my teammates about the solutions to such problems. Surprisingly, they were so supportive and gave me a lot of advice to overcome our difficulties. I then realized the importance of establishing a relationship with my peers, the dedication and responsibility to my demanding tasks. According to Louisa May Alcott, ‘it takes two flints to make a fire’. Thanks to this course, I can now understand how teamwork is capable of making the company successful.
We are always learning and exploring new things on the journey of growing up. As we all say, it is a never-ending process and this course allows me to discover so many things that I’ve known yet. The time that I have spent in the classrooms, with my friends and with the lecture - Mr Soumik Parida was an unforgettable experience. There are no words that can describe how I feel and how much I respect all these brilliant and beautiful people.
After this course, I have just made a commitment to myself that I would always give myself a chance to learn, to observe new things and build a mutual relationship with new people because one person can help to know one thing you have never discovered.
