This blog post marks the half way point of my senior project, and here I will reflect upon my experience so far and elaborate on what that means for the rest of my time at ACE Content going forward. I’ve been working on whatever I could. This has been easier for projects in their beginning stages, but I am not knowledgeable enough or skilled enough to work on projects in their latter, production-oriented stages. All of my work has been on projects in their early phases. I’ve helped on the creative end of things and the research end of things. Whether this means helping the creative team put together a slide deck for a client meeting, researching the market for a potential product launch which ACE would help a client execute, I’ve just been trying to find ways to make myself useful. Much of the process of how projects get executed step-by-step and how ACE communicates with their clients is still implicit and unknown to me, and this is because I’ve been shy about asking questions. This is something I will shift, as I want to dig deeper into how the company functions from other perspectives besides the internal creative and research work which I have become familiar with. Hopefully the projects I have been helping with come out during the span of this project so I can share them with our community in their finished stage. My happiness measure for this project so far on a scale from 1-10 is around a 6.5, mainly just because I feel like the novelty of the work environment has worn off and I don’t feel especially useful to the people around me besides being someone to delegate too. A bit of a negative perspective, but maybe that is a sign that I don’t find the work I do to help advertise media to be meaningful, which I am glad to have found out. Regardless, I will keep an open mind as I keep working, and I will make an effort to be less shy around asking questions, as well as really try to understand how the company operates instead of trying to make friends with my coworkers and be useful to them. This brings me to my next point. I have found the work environment and my coworkers to be very kind, open, and respectful. Very different than my mental images of the ad world taken from Mad Men. Overall though, I do think I might be underestimating how much I’ve really learned and absorbed, I probably have picked up on a lot more than I give myself credit for. I’ve learned about how creative takes feedback from their clients, from their director, and makes the necessary adjustments to the project’s plan. I have learned about how to brainstorm in meetings (the yes and trick from acting class applies here!) and outside of meetings, and I can also solidly say my sense of taste when it comes to style and design has improved tremendously working alongside our art director each day. These are just a few things I learned specific to ACE’s work, but more broadly, I have learned how to conduct myself in a work environment (etiquette around responsibilities, emails, checking in and out of work, criticizing and taking criticism, etc) as well. I look forward to continuing my time at ACE, making sure to keep the intention of balancing my immersion in the workflow by focusing on contributing with asking questions and taking time to learn more about how everything works holistically.