Since the Covid-19 epidemic and Stay at Home orders has affected your original plan for your Senior Project Experience, please reflect on your current essential question.
Some general helpful prompts to think about may be:

— How has your essential question changed throughout the 6 weeks?
— What did you expect to learn and how does that compare to what you did learn?
— How do you anticipate this experience changing you or affecting you going forward?
— What do you most want others to know about your SP Experience?

Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed my senior project experience. My essential question has undergone change throughout the past 6 weeks. I came into this project hoping to answer: “What makes a successful advertisement?” While this is a good question, I realized that it posed some challenges. My essential question centers around success, which can and will be defined differently depending on who you ask. To some in the advertising industry, success may be defined by how much money the advertisement makes for the brand it’s promoting while for others, it may be defined by the impact the ad has on the viewer. With this in mind, I geared my work more towards examining the relationship between advertising and our culture. I changed my essential question to “What is the relationship between advertising and culture?” However, sooner or later, I realized that my essential question isn’t what needed the change, it was my attitude towards approaching it. More specifically, I acknowledged that the research I had previously conducted was in fact answering my original essential question, even though it did not feel like it. In the end, my essential question stayed the same. 

Coming into this project I expected to learn about how an advertisement is created. I hoped to intern at ad agency Droga5, where I would interview and shadow members in each department to learn more about this. In the end, I learned a little bit about the storyboarding process and the trajectory of an advertisement creation. However, I did not go into as much depth as I had planned. I am actually happy, though, that this is the way my project turned out. I think that as much as I enjoy the creative process of advertising, I developed a stronger love for researching over my past 6 weeks. My senior project taught me that I am deeply interested in analyzing media and it’s purpose in our world. I think rather philosophically and always like to dig deep.

In addition to a new love for learning, this experience taught me an important life skill: self-motivation. Self-motivation is something I think most of us deem as necessary, but being all alone to complete work proved so. I saw how easy it was to become distracted by the internet. I learned to set boundaries for myself and know not to procrastinate. One thing that helped keep me motivated was forcing myself to stay excited about my work. It was easy to fall into moment’s of doubt or frustration even though deep down I knew that I was passionate about this subject. Most of the time, I just needed to remind myself of this. I will plan to bring these life skills with me into my college career.