My biggest battle in first year was our contextual studies essay! I have never had to write an essay before and as someone who didn't put much effort into English at school, the prospect of this essay was something I did not want to contend with. As well as having to learn as I went with writing in the academic style, collating research and using quotes when I had completed the essay to the best of my ability, I found the source and image referencing really time consuming and difficult too. Luckily I had made sure to photocopy any pages I used from books and bookmarked websites onto my laptop to make this process more organised and quicker. Although this was not one of my favourite parts of the course, I am proud that I have now officially completed an academic essay, recieving a 2:2 grade which I was thrilled with! It is always the first time for everything that is the most scary, so now I have a slightly better idea of what I am doing when researching, planning and writing an essay I will be able to hopefully improve until I feel comfortable and confident with the task. In order to get a higher grade in my next essay I am going to make the bibliography and do all necessary referencing as I go along, making sure that I follow the Harvard Referencing booklet from the library until referencing becomes second nature to me.
Photoshop was another aspect I found a very big struggle this year, this was and still is completely new to me and has caused me many hours of stressing throughout the year! In the lessons we had I found following the teachers instructions, making notes and watching what they were doing at the same time very frustrating, if you missed one step then the rest wouldn't work and I felt that the teachers were so advanced that it was hard for them to teach complete beginners in a way which we would understand. I found the help of one of my flat mates and my boyfriend who are competent photoshop users amazing as they would show me easier, quicker and more memorable short cuts to achieving the same effect which gave me confidence and taught me a lot. To think that in the first term I had absolutley no idea, but during second and third I could edit my photos with basic techniques and create moodboards without much help from anyone else such a victory because I didn't initially believe I would ever be able to use photoshop! I know that going into second year after 4 months without touching the programme I am going to be very rusty but I know I will pick it back up again, hopefully by this time next year I will be completely photoshop qualified and be able to simply edit my photos and create moodboards without any help at all.
As well as all of this time management has been a huge shock to the system, as before beginning the course I thought it would be the same kind of workload as at college (stupid I know). At college I studied a BTEC in Art & Design, during this course we only had one project to complete at a time per term. When we started first semester and I realised we had our main project (The New Elizabethans) alongside Digital Image Production I found these both hard to juggle and work consistently at both whilst also working part time at Cath Kidston. In 2nd/3rd term this became even harder as we also had the contextual studies essay to top Gothic Horror and Digital Image Production (I have already discussed how stressful the essay was!). As my part time job is the reason I am able to afford to study away from home I had to find a way to work this around my course which was harder than I thought as after uni I would come home and have to continue studying, and on my days off rather than winding down and catching up on sleep or work I would have to go off to do a shift. This is something I am still struggling with now but having a diary to organise my days and a study planner to help organise my work I hope that I will be able to find myself a nice little routine.
No comments:
Post a Comment