I really enjoyed the process of creating this project. I think my team did a great job working together and using our individual talents to drive the project forward. I really enjoyed the subject of DACA and I think it was a learning experience for all members involved. I would say all of us did our parts and contributed fairly. I appreciated Jacqueline taking the lead on the project and being so passionate about seeing it through. I had a lot of challenging fun working with the video interview and I think the end result was great. Kellyn and Tyler did a great job on the website and Meghan did a great just working on copy. Something I would do different as as team would be starting the website sooner. If we spent a little more time on it, the layout would have been better and we could’ve come up with a creative website name. I think it was the most challenging part of the project, but COVID-19 was probably the reason it took so long to start on it. Other than that, I’m proud to have been a part of this team and the resulting project. It was a great learning experience and something worth adding to a portfolio as well.

After giving our final presentation on Wednesday, I feel confident about my contribution to the group’s work and about my fellow group member’s contributions. I honestly think that this was one of the best groups I’ve worked with in college so far. It was super easy for us to communicate and everyone was always prepared to jump on the next thing that needed to be done. I think that our final website turned out really nicely and that we were able to effectively put it together in a way that provided emotional stories as well as a good amount of information on DACA. I’d be happy to show the website to anyone who wanted to learn more or any who has any concerns or questions about DACA. Getting nine people to tell their stories provided so much diversity to the stories and allowed us to really get our point across that DACA is something that is not only beneficial to the people in these stories but also to the rest of us who are not directly affected by it.

I think our final presentation went over very smoothly and our group was able to articulate our point really well and show how much we care about the subject. We all had different parts of the website that we covered and other than some user experience and design issues, we seemed to get positive feedback on the “meat” of the project such as the projects and information. This project has helped me to dabble more in making websites as well as putting a lot of different kinds of information together to tell a complete story. I am sure that I will have to do these kinds of things a lot in my future career so it was nice to have a class to test out these skills. Overall, I am proud of my group and think we managed to put together a project that was not only pleasing to look at but also tackled a topic that is very serious in a way that is very approachable and informational.

I think that this experience has been the most realistic experience I have had so far as to what working in the industry will actually be like. I consider myself to be good at working in a group setting, but I think this project really allowed me to open up about my ideas and opinions, more so than I have in the past. I have said this so many times, but I really think that my group had the perfect variety of skills, which made it easy to delegate different tasks, and it still be a fair contribution of work on everybody’s part. I am not necessarily the best at things like video editing or graphics, but where I lacked in skills, that was somebody else’s strength. My biggest strength is writing and at first I was worried that the way we delegated jobs would make it feel as though I was not contributing enough, but it actually turned out to be a lot more work than I had anticipated, which is never a bad thing in regards to the project we were doing. I think that everybody pulled their weight and made it a really painless process to put together a project that we are all so passionate about and proud of. The only challenges we faced were due to the fact that we had to go remote for the remainder of the semester, which made it hard connection wise at times, but I am confident we would not have hit any of those roadblocks had we been able to set up meetings in person.

Looking back now and reflecting on this semester, I feel extremely proud of my group, especially because this was a new topic for pretty much everyone. Even I was able to learn a lot from being trusted to tell these stories. As Katie, mentioned, we learned a lot about how to approach such a sensitive topic, and these are valuable lessons that I will carry with me onto all future projects that I work on. Not only do I recognize my own growth throughout the semester, but also that of my teammates. For example, when we were doing our practice presentation, we thought it would be a good idea if Tyler would talk about his experience sitting in on Brytany’s interview, and I was extremely moved by what he had to say, and how he learned a lot from telling these dreamers stories as well. The whole point of this project was to educate people about DACA and to encourage them to hear the stories of these dreamers, and even if nobody else ends up seeing this project, for me it’s enough knowing that my group members were able to take away something from it. This project was something that was very special to me because of my personal connection to the people that we interviewed. It was nice to hear the feedback and comments that our instructors had about the project, especially when Lauren said that you could tell that we really cared, and that it showed through our work. We haven’t discussed all the details as to when or if we will make this public, but I really want to. I would definitely want to work on fixing some of the more technical issues that the instructors mentioned before we do though. Overall, I’m really happy with what my team accomplished this semester, and I feel grateful that I was paired with such motivated and compassionate individuals who helped bring this ideas that we had at the beginning of the semester to life.

What a semester. This class really challenged me, and put to use everything that I had learned up to this point. It was also a great boost to my confidence, it really was a class that I didn’t look forward to taking but it helped me tremendously. The project turned out amazing, I was nervous about the project simply because I knew nothing about it or how to attack it, but it really grew me as a student and I am very glad it all happened the way it did. I am happy with my performance, given everything that has happened I think we all did the best we could. I developed some new skills along the way that will help me a lot in the future. My team was great, and I’m extremely happy with how hardworking, understanding and diligent they have been throughout the course of this semester. They all have great skills and I think they all were able to add new skills that will help them down the road. The only thing I would’ve done differently would be to have gotten some more video interviews done before classes were cancelled but there was no way to predict any of that. The most challenging thing was being comfortable with my skills and working with people I had never met, but it was nice to be out of my comfort zone and I really am thankful for it. I think everything went well, I am really happy with our end result.

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This past week we did our practice presentation. I was initially worried, just because everyone is overwhelmed with their other finals and classes but I think we did a really good job of coming together and getting a majority of the website complete. The feedback that we received was very helpful. Some of the things that our instructor suggested that we work on before our final presentation were things like renaming our tabs, breaking up the long video interview into shorter ones, and adding more information to the Resources tab.  She also suggested that we include more details in our final presentation about the reasoning behind doing transcripts rather than videos for the majority of our interviews. We also plan to work on other things like the way the interviews are set up so there’s not too much text. All of this information was very helpful, and it’s things that can easily be fixed before our final presentation.

This week we has our practice presentation. I think that overall we did really well and are in a position to where this isn’t anything major that needs to be changed. I was worried that we would be under the time limit, which we were, but I think that is something that will easily be fixed once we have all the additional things added to our website. We decided to break up and assign different portions of the website to different people in the group. This way each of us is talking about one specific thing, and we are each particularly knowledgable on that specific thing. I think that this worked really well for us, not only because it makes it a smoother experience for the audience, but it allows us to know exactly when we each need to start talking and makes it so that we aren’t stumbling on each others words. My portion of the presentation is going through the interviews and speaking on how we conducted then and how they are set up on the website. I think that biggest thing for me personally that I was unsure about was how into depth I should go into depth I should go with the interviews. Since a lot of our interviews are written and not video, I didn’t want to just read a part of the interview, but after getting feedback, I think that I could may be go into depth about a specific answer that one of the participants gave or even a short summary of the persons interview as a whole. I think that the suggestion of also explaining how allowing the participants to do phone calls instead of videos really helped encourage them to open up to us on a sensitive topic. We also plan on splitting the video into multiple clips and setting them up with the header being the question that was asked this was the videos are shorter and the layout is similar to the layout of the written interviews. Other than that, I think that it is a really good sign that all of the suggestions made to us were things that we already had planned on changing.

We presented this week and I was very pleased with how our group did considering the circumstances we have had to deal with. I am completely confident going into our final presentation. We have been made aware of the things we need to fix before next week and have already divided up tasks, I will be adding to the resources page after some very helpful critique. We will all be working on our specific page of the website this week, and will then review the entire website as a group to go over some final touches and some real minor fixes. We also need to do some final tweaks on each story page and rename some of our page titles. Other than a few minor details we are done, and will further revise how we are presenting our speech so that it adheres to the time limits.

This week I worked on the resources page and some general pieces on the website such as the menu bar and some links to other sources for our research page. The only thing that was challenging this week was going through the rubric piece by piece and making sure that every little things was accounted for. Another challenge was also dividing up the speaking points and the general flow of our presentation.

This week, our team started putting the finishing touches on the website. I took charge of laying out the design and flow of the website and I think it works well together and has a lot of interesting elements. We focused on three pages, stories, facts, and resources. As you go through the website, it is easy to find different stories and information about DACA. Everyone pitched in to fill the website with all of the needs media and text and I think we just need to add the suggestions we were given and it will help make it more complete. I found that building out websites takes a lot of time and toying around with different things. At first, we had the story pages as blog posts but we found that it looked better to make individual pages for each person.

Our biggest problem with the practice presentation was our overall time. We were at about 9 minutes and we need to make it closer to 15. I think this will be very achievable if we go into depth on some of the stories. We also need to add more information to the “resources” tab to make it feel more complete and less like an afterthought. Once we do this, I think it would be beneficial to go into depth about what these organizations do. We are also going to play a part of our video interview because we forgot to bring that up in the practice presentation and that will also add at least a minute. Overall, I am very excited about our website and think it has come together nicely. Working together to add the last few stories as well as a bit more to the “facts” and “resources” pages will go a long way.