School Work

These are different projects that I have completed in class during my time as an undergraduate student at the University of Cincinnati. Each piece is accompanied by a summary and a personal reflection. The items at the top are the most recent! Hover your cursor over the WORK tab to be able to see my professional and extracurricular experience.

Spring Semester 2021

My final capstone

The English Rhetoric and Professional Writing tracks culminates in a service-learning Capstone project with a local non-profit organization. I worked with a team of two other graduating seniors on whatever the nonprofit decided they needed most. My team and I worked with Childhood Food Solutions (CFS) in Cincinnati in the zip cod 45225, the poorest zip code in the Cincinnati area. CFS sends food home with children after school, but during the COVID era, they are making home deliveries. CFS does important work for the community that needs them most, and I was grateful to help them in any way possible. Their (part time) executive director needed help in improving their online presence and website, so my group and I created social media pages, promotional documents, website recommendations, and an overall research report of their demographic.

Below is a description of my personal project within the Capstone team, the social media guide.

Childhood food solutions social Media guide

I spearheaded the social media guide for Childhood Food Solutions, and it includes all aspects of how best to use social media and its entities to better serve a more diverse group. I researched these topics from social media dedicated sites, the social sites themselves, as well as used the demographic information from my teammate. More and more today, people are trusting social media for their most important information about an organization. I included pages on Industry Best Practices, with tips on using all aspects of social media, from captioning a post to gaining followers, and included links with the sources. I then discussed crisis communication, just in case of a social media emergency, or a disgruntled client bashing food bags online. The content pillars, or themes to which the CFS posts should play, are volunteers, donors, and clients of CFS services. The mock posting schedule and posting checklist go hand in hand, not as end-all, be-all documents, but working documents to best serve the needs of CFS posters and viewers.

This project was very meaningful to me, and was a great wrap on my collegiate career. After presenting our final draft to the Childhood Food Solutions Executive Director, she was so grateful and expressed that our project will be much more sustainable than just a semester-long Capstone project. I worked really well with my team, which is something I’m grateful for, and we produced important documents that will serve CFS and the demographic in zip code 45225 for years to come. Even though this is a bittersweet ending, I’m happy I got to finish on a meaningful, service-based learning project like this one.

Personal Site

My first intro to Wordpress was creating a personal site that had information about me, much like this site! I used a lot of the same information that is listed on this site, just because I had easy access to this information. Wordpress was definitely a learning curve for me. I’m used to super user-friendly site builders (like SquareSpace), and as much as Wordpress was similar, it was a bit trickier. In the end, I’m happy to have stuck it out and finished my site, with the help of professor and peer review, and it will be an important skill in the future.

Client Site

For a final project in Web Authoring, I was tasked in making a client-based website via WordPress, with a little bit of basic HTML included. HTML was a whole new language to me, so learning and trying this was really difficult for me to learn, but once I had it figured out, I felt extremely powerful and smart! I was able to pick my own client and theme for this site, so naturally I featured Frankie, my roommate’s puppy, and his modeling career. He has plenty of photos to work with and to showcase, so it was nearly a no-brainer. While he can be a difficult client to work with, I’m speaking with his manager (my roommate) about the site. I will never get tired of showing off how cute Frankie can be.

Fall semester 2020

Reflection

This group-based project took up a good majority of the end of the semester, as we first initiated contact with our chosen nonprofit at the end of October. As a group, we first looked at the original website that Healthy Harvest Mobile Market had up and running. It was bare and did not have enough information to best serve their clients. We then used our research from in-class activities, and made recommendations on how to best move forward in producing a new site that will better reach and serve a wider population. We also made recommendations to improve their social media, which also will help them serve more of the areas in which they work. This project was well received by the organization, and was a great warm-up project before the final capstone, which is highlighted above.

Reflection

Learning how to use the Adobe Creative Suite, especially Photoshop, was something that I was really looking forward to in this course. It was the first time I had ever used any of these tools, so I very much experienced a steep learning curve. It was tricky at first, but once I got the hang of it, I felt very confident incorporating different elements into my design. I took most, if not all, of my inspiration from other Marvel Avengers movies, especially the original Avengers movie from 2012. I loved the look of the poster with the hero cropped in like they’re looking over their city, always protecting. Frankie is only 15 pounds, so he is definitely the smallest Avenger. When I turned in the project, had to include a brief summary of the movie, in which I got to be really creative. I made up Frankie’s origin story (of him finding a special tennis ball at the dog park), and my professor did admit she appreciated my humor in this project. I really enjoyed this and I’m very happy with how my final project turned out. This was a great way to learn how to use Photoshop for someone new to the game like myself.

Reflection

I had never heard of Illustrator before this class, nevertheless knew what exactly the functions were, so this was definitely eye opening. In my opinion, this was the hardest to understand and use out of the three that I used in Desktop Publishing. It took me a while (and a couple online tutorials) to figure out how exactly to create shapes, draw, and use the different vector tools. With this project, I had to create three different logos that could all be used for the imaginary store. Two of those are incorporated in my business card design; the word Grind with the skateboard as the I on the front, and the three mountains on the back. I liked using the same blue color and gradient for my designs to keep it all consistent, and the color reminded me of the snow. My first project with Illustrator was a rougher than this one, so I’m happy with the way this turned out, and hopefully I see nothing but improvement moving forward!

Spring semester 2020

Reflection

This has been one of my favorite projects from my college career. I have always been one to highlight or circle passages from books that I’m reading just because I like the way they’re written. This was great because I was able to write them down in a dedicated space, and then analyze them and give reasons as to why I love them so much. I chose to do a combination of passages that I like from different things I read, like a textbook, a poetic song, and two imitations I worked on for another class. I especially enjoyed compiling this project in the end because I could add visually stylistic elements that I couldn’t add to the original journal. I still keep up with my common place journal whenever I’m reading, and I have a feeling that I will for a long time!

Reflection

This was an article we read for a long time in Writing with Style. The original author’s word choice and vivid descriptions made it a one-of-a-kind piece that we knew, students studying specifically the style, that it was great. We read it, analyzed it, picked out words we loved, and then read it again. My professor had us imitate the piece, which was really intimidating to me because quite frankly, how to I follow up on that? She wanted us to choose outside of the bo topics; something that no one else would choose, so I chose the moving truck. This was timely because my family was moving! I wrote an ode to the moving truck that I titled, “Tractors and Trailers of Someone Else’s Sh*t”.

Reflection

In February of 2020, I learned in class that the Olympics were being postponed, and at that time, that was all we could think about. How crazy it was that things were being cancelled half way across the world due to a disease no one really knew about. Fast forward less than a month later and the entire country was in a lockdown quarantine. I wrote this paper in April of 2020, so the information was really fresh. My professor was worried I wouldn’t have enough information, but I was almost overwhelmed with different sources; both very trustworthy and simple speculations. I think this paper is now outdated, even only after a few months, but at the time, it was the height of news stories we covered in Communication in Sports.

fall semester 2019

Reflection

With my short TedTalk-style piece, I wanted to write something lighthearted, yet still incorporated the two elements of creative writing research the assignment required. In taking something so lightly, I was able to use more of my everyday tone with my Interstate-75 short talk. My dad, a quoted frequent traveler, was more than happy to share his disdain for the bland ride he takes to and from work each day. I was hesitant to share this in class because the majority of my peers went for a more serious topic, and upon hearing theirs, I didn’t want to completely change the vibe of the room. Despite my hesitation, I received a great response from both my classmates and my professor. Using I75 as the topic for my final assignment was a risky move, but was worth it in the end.

Reflection

Something that I’ve practiced for years on end is the art of writing an essay about a novel. Though I know I am far from perfection, I think that I have made great strides in the right direction; if only I still had my high school finals! I very much enjoyed all of these novels over the course of the semester, and so it was hard for me to choose one novel, or even two, to compare for my final in this class. This was such an interesting topic to me because the course was designed for us to read as the years went on; we began with Gatsby in the 1920s and moved our way forward. It was difficult at times to even begin comparing the societal norms because in each novel, they were very different than the previous. I enjoyed the challenge, and I was very happy with both the way my final turned out, and my grade!

Reflection

I was so moved when I first read George Ella Lyons’ poem, Where I’m From, that after hearing the assignment to create our own, I was excited to have a topic I know so much about be the basis of my next creative writing endeavor. It became almost difficult to weed out which parts of home I wanted to include in my poem. I had so many great things to choose from; be it in Cincinnati or Toledo; with family or with friends. It was such a personal piece that I feel like there were no wrong answers. I did, however, get a few comments during a peer review session that it was almost too specific to me and what I know. Even though this might be true, the personal touches are what makes each similar work so special. I feel so lucky that I have so many great things to include in an emotional work about where I’m from.

Reflection

This paper was answering the discussion question that I wrote, “Are we, as readers, supposed to feel bad for Cholly”. I went into great detail using what felt like at the time an obscene amount of direct quotes from Morrison, but this worked out in my favor. I got an A on the paper and my professor commented that it was a “damn good” paper and that I was able to “use Morrison’s words to make my point”. I was really happy with the way this essay turned out, and I learned that sometimes the more quotes, the better!

spring semester 2019

Reflection

For this project, I made sure to do comprehensive research, first on different rhetorical schemes and tropes, and then on my specific choice, parallelism. By doing such in-depth research, I was able to make a complete, comprehensive definition of the term. I provided three different, yet equally recognizable examples that proved to viewers that this device was used more often than realized. The bottom line of this assignment, as outlined by the assignment sheet, is to move outside of my comfort zone of the typical essay. This document utilizes different design techniques, which is something I previously had not utilized nearly ever. The process of editing, revising, and really paying attention to the visual aspects of this project was the most challenging, yet the most helpful part. There is always room for improvement and ways to be better, and here, the spacing could have been more effectively used with the summaries. My biggest takeaway here was the demanding nature of using different online graphic tools, yet in the long run, the effort is always worth it.

Reflection

Developing and composing an essay without a formal assignment sheet was something I had been exposed to in high school International Baccalaureate classes, but the added difficulty was in the engagement factor. Sure, I want all of my papers to be engaging, but to create a paper whose sole purpose is to make readers want to continue proved to be a challenge for me. In order to generate interest for readers as well as my professor, I decided to branch out of my comfort zone and create a comparison work. When narrowing down different ideas, I had the basic idea of making a compare and contrast essay, but narrowing down the comparison was tricky. There are plenty of differences between these two novels, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but seeing similarities was challenging. The genre of post-apocalyptic fiction lent me a helping hand in seeing that the theme of survival was evident throughout each story, yet each with different context. Survival can mean different things for different people, which is stressed both in the paper, and in each novel. Writing an essay based on a book is something I have been doing since middle school, but taking new approaches and developing writing in some of its most simplistic forms can be beneficial for students of any skill level. I am always eager to improve any form of my writing.

Reflection

The process of completing a document analysis was something that I had become well versed in by the time this assignment came up. Over the course of the semester for this Intro class, during ‘virtual class’ days, we were assigned a document analysis in place of coming to class. By the time we were assigned the larger project, I had already completed four document analysis assignments. The virtual class analyses were much smaller and most of the time did not include as much detail, so the real challenge of this assignment was going into so much more depth than I had been used to. I knew the rhetorical features, like ethos, pathos, and logos; I understood the effects of language and visual aspects on a document, but in order to create a much longer critique, I really had to dive into each aspect of the features of the article. The new CSE Number Citation Style was challenging for me at first, only because I’m so used to using MLA or APA style. I had to do my research and be thorough in doing so to make sure that I was citing properly. I think adding some outside sources other than the article itself really helped in proving my claims about the article, and also helped me become more familiar with the citation style. This tedious paper was not only an extension of what I had been doing previously, but it was a way to become more familiar with tools to create an effective document.

reflection

Creative writing has never truly been my strong suit, at least in my eyes. I always struggle with length; it’s always too long or too short. While this paper was assigned as more of a formal essay-style piece, it still had the creative elements that I had never really focused on. In high school and even previous English classes, the assignments have always been super formal MLA or APA style papers. This paper was required to have that MLA heading and format, but I was given a lot of freedom in terms of topic, language, diction, and the overall way I wrote. In order to get in the right page requirements, I chose to do something that I could easily write five pages about, but something that I felt would not require much more than that. In choosing the first time I flew alone (which, mind you, was December of 2018), I could really tap into my thoughts and feelings of that experience because it was so recent. When writing formal papers, I usually write in an academic tone, as most students or writers usually do, but with the freedom here, I was able to write in a conversational tone. I feel as though in this paper, my true voice really shines and I’m able to create a memorable piece of work.