Brianna Adu-Kyei                                Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Senior Project Critical Reflection                        Senior Project Experience

Critical Reflection #2: Write about a single experience or moment, and ask: how does this moment, experience, or encounter relate to my essential question?

Essential Question:  How can I share my excitement about learning with a wider audience (through podcasting)?

To be frank, my Senior Project experience has been defined by crisis. First a pandemic sweeps the globe, and we’re stuck inside our homes indefinitely. Then, we have to redesign our project on much shorter notice with much more limited resources. For me personally, I also struggled to stay motivated and complete my assignments when each day felt exactly like the next and keeping track of time got harder and harder. Being stuck inside for over a month with the same people and not even able to go on a grocery run didn’t help either. There were also a number of technical issues out of my control: the reference books I asked for not getting sent (I still haven’t received one of them!), four years of data on my phone being lost (and not being able to use it for recordings and interviews), and my audio recording saving itself as 2200 separate 6-second clips in an abstruse order.

That being said, I’m still hanging in there. I’ve been trying to do the things I can do in the meantime: if editing my podcast is difficult, then I’ll start research on the next one. I enjoyed practicing pronunciation and doing workbook exercises with my dad as a nice little bonding experience that also counts towards researching languages. I can also keep on studying Japanese, and practice texting my classmates in French. These are still helping me with my project, and even though I might have stuff that I’d like to be doing more, I’m still sticking with my project and riding out the foibles.