Reflecting on “The ‘Needs’ of a First Generation College Student”

One of the main challenges of Project 4 was to shift our purpose of the autoethnography to better appeal to the audience. In Project 3, the autoethnography was aimed towards a more scholarly audience with knowledge and interest in the studies of humans. The purpose was to add personal reflection that added a new perspective to the current research on first generation college students. It also offered new ways institutions could approach their first generation students. Because the audience was scholarly, Project 3 included more emphasis on the scientific background that balanced out with the personal narrative. However, our audience in Project 4 shifted to a more popular audience. Because of this, we decided to put of an emphasis on the personal narrative rather than the scientific research. This would not only appeal to our audience, but they would also find it relatable since a lot of them would be college students. This was not the only difference between Project 4 and Projects 1 through 3. Because this was a group project, we had to work together and become united in our ideas and their execution in order for everything to work well. For instance, when doing the script, it wasn’t just one individual completely controlling the entire thing. We were all spitting out different ideas and deciding all together whether or not to go with it or not. In the other projects, whatever you thought, you did for the project. While this could have posed a big problem, our group did a good job being fair to everyone’s opinion on creating the video. Since we were in a group, it was a completely different writing process than the first three projects. All four of us had entirely different schedules to begin with, but coming back, with it being finals week, it was even harder trying to find times where everyone was available to meet up. One of the most important parts of a group project is developing a plan to efficiently delegate tasks by the strengths of each group member. This was trickier considering we couldn’t meet up as much as we would have liked. Instead, a lot of our initial planning was done through communication by phone. Besides the meetings we had in class, we would use the group message in order to talk to each other about what we were doing and we would just meet when necessary, such as to create the script and record the video. With that being said we still did a good job of knowing what each person was responsible for. A lot of what we did was as a group; luckily, when we were able to meet, we were able to meet for a long time and get a lot accomplished. Initially, we were going to do an interview style video, so we worked on developing questions for Brooke to answer. As mentioned earlier, we didn’t have the chance to meet up that much so this was done through a group Google Doc. We were all on the document at the same time, and Google Docs lets you see what each person is doing as they do it, so it was almost like being in the same room while we were working on it. After creating our first set of questions, we decided it would be even better to incorporate the sources into the questions to make it less awkward to bring up scholarly sources throughout our answers. While this was a good idea, and the interview came out well, after going through the peer reviews, we realized it would be best to scratch the interview idea and focus more on making the video more interesting than just a simple interview. We aimed to tell a real story through our video. It was almost like a skit to let Brooke get her main points from her paper to show in the video. We were able to meet up all together as a group one very solid time in order to develop the script and actually go through the filming itself. Luckily, we got along very well and the conversations felt natural. Logan and Nigel were responsible for asking leading questions to have Brooke go through her story naturally, Brooke was responsible for casually dropping in her sources in her answers. Foster took the lead in the filming and editing of the video itself.

When editing the video Foster had to take a lot into consideration in terms of our audience and what we wanted the video to do for them. He had to keep them engaged throughout and answer any questions before they arose in the minds of the viewers. The pictures that we use are for that purpose, and he had to keep their timing on the screen short enough to where the audience didn’t become bored of the picture, but long enough so the audience could see the reason for its placement. The meat of our argument is kept in the audio, but we wanted pictures to back up the information we were giving in the audio itself. Another difficult task was trying to figure out how to bring the interview with Jess to life. We wanted to have a visual that wasn’t just pictures from Facebook or Google, but one that showed that we were actively listening to her responses, and part of the conversation as well even though she did not wish to be filmed, which was an ethical decision to honor that on the part of our group. Foster said:

“I tried many different methods of animating this part of the video. I tried drawing it on an app on an iPad but was unable to email it. I also tried filming and speeding up me drawing on a white board, but the camera angle was too distracting from the illustrations. I ended up having to screenshot piece by piece the words and a Venn diagram into the video in order to give picture to what Jess was saying.”

It was also important to us to show that this issue we were talking about wasn’t just black and white, which is why we felt it was important to use the Venn diagram to address that there are different feelings and opinions that pre-orientation programs can affect someone.

Even though no one was exactly thrilled across the board to have a group project going on while our first final exams were taking place, we really felt like we came together and worked extremely well together, especially for only knowing one another for a semester. All of our ideas were brought forward and the discussion that followed was always informative and respectful. Going forward in other projects like this and just in general, we thought we learned how to manage our time and how important it is to be able to meet face to face. On our main filming day. Logan was late because of a haircut, but the rest of us were able to set up a script and screenplay of sorts so that right when Logan got back we were able to roll directly into the filming and use some new insight. We all thought that our biggest takeaway was the understanding of how to work in a group as we grow up, and how disagreements can be handled respectfully. There were so many times that our ideas weren’t the same but ended up a conglomeration of the ideas themselves that led to a successful video.

Logan Harvey, Brooke Christensen, Nigel Thompson, and Foster Stroup