Reflecting on the “Importance of Mindfulness”

There was one day in Professor Giovanelli’s class when she asked us who had worked in a group project before and everybody raised their hands. We all thought we knew what group projects were, but since we were all probably those over-achieving students in high school who led most of them, we didn’t really know what to expect. Immediately after, she advised us that group projects in college would be a different experience. We didn’t realize facing back how true that statement would hold.

The first part was easy. We joined a group with classmates that we didn’t know well but had made conversations with at some point or another, so coming up with goals and assigning roles came naturally. It was fulfilling those goals that proved challenging for us. Transitioning from an individual writing assignment to a video group project seemed like an unexpected use of time. We were testing the waters, and it didn’t help that we were all disinclined in our abilities to compose a video online and schedule around our busy lives. Finals week and Thanksgiving break did a number on our project, and we would all agree that our video would’ve been significantly better if we didn’t wait on the Sunday before break to start it. It came across all our minds that same day that working in group projects means making time for good ideas early on and carefully planning it out so there is more time left for revision. Samantha and Rafi thought at one point that we should’ve scrapped the project midway and taken on a new, seemingly simpler autoethnography, but came to realize that we were able to make our purpose clear anyway. We attempted to tell people about mindfulness and educate them on being mindful through the perspective of a typical college student, and through a variety of media and text, the purpose was clear and we still engaged our viewers with unintentional hilarious video of Kai trying to be “not mindful.”

Another trending obstacle was figuring out how to invoke ethos on a popular audience, whom were at once just social scientists, through the required use of 6 scholarly sources. Kai’s paper needed more scholarly sources, therefore we faced a problem we hadn’t looked into enough when deciding whose project we would use, but Rafi and him were able to find some in order to reveal the significance of why his story mattered. All in all, we came to learn more about ourselves at the end of this video. Sam played around with and learned the basics of iMovie, Kai got a glimpse of being an actor of his own life, Tater kept our conversations lighthearted which made it easier for us to communicate, and Rafi learned the diligent task of time management with other people. We didn’t know that completing this project in difference to the last would have challenged us so much, but we realized that these acquired technological and social skills would prepare us for future group projects.

Starting out, we made our goals clear. We wanted to complete this project making sure our audience knew what being mindful meant, especially since most of us had a hard time learning it ourselves. Additionally, we had to do this with scarce sources and ambiguity towards a bigger picture. Raising awareness of mindfulness was something Kai wanted to evoke, so it was up to all of us to define that reason, keeping in mind the evidence we should use and how to incorporate it into the video with clarity. We could only do this with each of our own defined roles that we naturally brought up by ourselves. We created jobs for ourselves when we realized it was needed and nobody else could do the task. For example, Tater sacrificed himself by being the one to cite and upload APA references when Sam was editing, Rafi was writing the script, and Kai was finding more sources. There was never a time when we wanted to assign someone in charge. There are pros and cons to having a single leader and not having one, but through our methods, we challenged ourselves to step up and be there for each other. It was a relief when Rafi offered to organize all our ideas for the reflection and write it herself because we figured it would take less time, and it did. Group projects are effective because it allows for delegation and separating roles so we don’t have to delve into it by ourselves, and it also makes it easier to meet in smaller groups when someone couldn’t make it.

The process of making this video was different for all of us. We each had different concerns that we tried to get done at the same time, but some were more complicated than others. Kai remembers having to do revision on his topic with little time left and half of the video already recorded. He struggled reaching his purpose through his sources, so it took getting up at 9am on the last day for him to record the new scholarly sources we would use. Still, we all thought that what he said fit well with what we had already recorded. Like when he referenced the concept of struggling college students, it made sense to have himself, a struggling college student, tossing and turning in bed from a hard day of class. We also didn’t foresee how funny it would be to watch Kai angrily throw books off a table in slow motion. Most of us didn’t get the reason why it was such a good idea to make the video funny until Samantha pointed out that putting humor into our project would help us connect better with our popular audience, even though Kai’s scholarly paper wasn’t humorous itself. Therefore, rhetorical choices were essential to this project. Our knowledge of Kairos was challenged during every edit of the video. Some more examples included using peaceful pictures that helped illustrate mindfulness, or filtering black and white image on Kai’s meltdown, or shortening down complex sentences used in Kai’s paper to make the audio easier to understand.

It took plenty of time and effort to complete this project, but we were able to manage it well with our delegated tasks and compilation of ideas. All of us were satisfied with our finished product, but agree that we could’ve gotten a lot more done if we had more time. If we all didn’t leave for Thanksgiving Break, then we could’ve utilized that time to think of a more creative theme for the video, or have more video of Kai living his life, or incorporate media of other struggling college students trying to practice mindfulness. But since we didn’t, we had to quickly choose from a narrow strip of ideas and go with it. Looking back, it feels reassuring to know that we’ll be remembering this experience and will know how to execute our planning better in future projects. There is no shortage of group work in college, and most definitely not when we’re working from our future firms or labs or even homes. We have to work with other people one way or another in our fields to make our time and knowledge valuable to a bigger conversation.

Samantha Jones-Shah, Rafaella Vaca-Tricerri, Kai Lin, and Tater Rennhack