This journal covered my final projects of the first year of my Foundation Degree. As far as the quality of the writing is concerned in this journal, it has still remained very detailed, very lengthy and very personal. One thing I feel I have always been good at is letting others know how I feel, and this is certainly seen in the reflective learning journal entries so far. I will always write how I feel about the lectures and the coursework, and whether I have felt nervous, happy or upset with how each lesson, each day, my coursework, or even an event in my personal life has gone.
I also feel that, along with my previous collection of journal entries, I do discuss events in my personal life a lot too, which can often have an effect on how I feel when I am at college, and at times has influenced my own work. Examples of this include my trip to Paris, counselling I was receiving at the time and my birthday.
Something new I have added to this journal is coursework and research for certain modules! I can't remember if it was assigned that I wrote certain aspects of my research and coursework, but I felt it was a good way to record the coursework, as it kept a lot of my work in one place. It also reminds me now of what I was doing at college back then. I do feel that I am still a bit disorganised with recording my research, and I feel that doing loads of research to justify my work is something I will definitely not miss after I finish my Foundation Degree.
However, I do feel that the quality of my posts declined a bit towards the end of this journal, as I felt I was being more descriptive and less reflective. I also noticed I was posting pictures a lot less often, which is a shame because I feel pictures make the written work much more interesting and also makes it easier for the reader(s) to understand and explains your work well too. This may have been because, especially towards the end of the year there is lots of other coursework to do. I also discovered a new career opportunity that I could follow during this time, looking into Art Therapy, which really motivated me to do well on my Foundation Degree, and even though before I was considering creative writing, because I felt I was good at writing, this may have affected my journal and written work, causing me to be less focused on it. I do feel that, possibly because my life is pretty good right now, and because I have other significant things going on in my life right now, I don't want to write so much down in my personal life these days, but this did certainly help to explain how I was feeling and how it affected my studying last year.
There were also some journal entries I forgot to finish. For example I would write "..... because..." or "Lynda said..." without typing much else afterwards. This was just because I forgot to, and was a bit careless when writing the journals. When writing the journals, I probably found it easy to procrastinate onto something completely unrelated to my coursework or maybe I would move onto other work in the middle of writing journal, and forgetting to come back to this. At times I probably still do that now!
I was also comparing myself to when I was on the BTEC course quite a bit, as I remember voluntarily writing something similar to a reflective journal back then, to express my thoughts and feelings about college and relationships with friends, family and lecturers. I even wrote briefly about looking back at these journal entries on the Interactive Media course on 14th March 2013.
As for how I was feeling about college and the Foundation Degree, I feel that since receiving counselling and receiving a leaflet explaining to me about Shyness and Social Anxiety in March, as well as all the social situations I was involved with in Paris, socialising at college became much better. I remember writing about the Paris trip when Michelle, who acted as a mentor to me during the trip, did mention that, even though I doubted it at times I was "mixing well with the people on the trip"This support did mean a lot to me, and I feel that this trip definitely did help with me mixing with others around college. Since then, because most of the people I knew around college have left college, I miss those people, but since then, the socialising at college hasn't been too bad. I am still occasionally in touch with a few people from last year too.
However, the workload was quite stressful, especially with coming to terms of how Neil structured the work, especially the research and planning parts of the module. I think at the time I did feel a bit uncomfortable around him, and at times I did find it difficult to take his feedback, especially on the 17th April after I had done some concept sketches for trading card characters.
I think to be honest both Neil and myself have learned from these experiences. I think I have learned to be more open to suggestions, and having a clearer goal for what to do after my Foundation Degree has really motivated me to do well as well. I have also learned to be more on track with my projects. I think Neil is much more constructive with feedback now and knows me a lot better, so would know what would make me upset.
However, looking back, Neil B was right about some things, such as one project idea being too ambitious, and having varying designs. I probably felt I had done a lot of work at this point, I had a lot on my mind, and this caused upset and frustration.
However, since this, Neil and I have got on much better and have not been too upset at college since then. I also remember several 1 to 1 meetings with Neil which included my support as well where several things were being discussed, such as possible future career paths, which I feel has hugely motivated me to do well on the course, and how I was currently doing, which at the time needed improvement. I definitely did notice this at the time, and I feel that since this, I have definitely tried much harder on the Degree and have got on much better with everyone at college and am much happier at college.
I also needed to record in my journal some new Maya techniques, such as the cloth technique and tornado technique. Also couldn't remember how to backface culling/reverse normals, a bit like the present day, so recorded that in this journal as well. I feel that recording new things I've learned is really important, as I'm more likely to remember them, even though I don't and to be honest, it's probably quicker to search online how to do something in particular in Maya. I still feel it is important to record new things I've learned, as it's really like recording research.
I think for a lot of the first year of the Foundation Degree I struggled to settle in to the new course, having a significantly greater amount of work expected from me, as well as mixing with and meeting new people, all of which was quite difficult. However, over time, and especially after making new friends on the Paris trip and having a clearer goal of what I wanted to do after the Foundation Degree, I did start to feel overall more positive at college.
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