Reflection of Weekly Goals #1

At the start of the week, I set three goals I would like to accomplish by the end of this week. This article will keep me accountable and note my progress so far.

One of my goals this week was to apply for a great amount of internships. At this moment it seems like a great amount of internship opportunities have passed. From what I've been told, the big companies usually hire late in the Fall semester. A lot of us felt that there did not seem to be an urgency for us interaction design students to apply for internships back then so at the moment we're applying to these internships like crazy.

For this reason, my first goal this week was to apply to as many internships as I could this week—at least ten. To keep on track and record this progress, I have created a little Google Spreadsheet of all the internships I have applied to. So far I have applied to eight; still have at least two to go by the end of this week.

I definitely want to apply for more. What makes it even more exciting is that I have already gotten two emails back of hiring managers for these companies wanting to interview me, which is amazing! So, that is definitely motivating me and the urgency to scalp any internships left; especially for these companies that excite me.

The next goal of mine was to secure an internship. At this moment in time, it is still pretty early since the interview appointments that I have are in the middle of this month. Though, that is still good progress. One of the ways I thought I could achieve this was by modifying each resume and cover letter that I send it to its specific requirements, which I have been doing; at least to the ones that it seems necessary. I received this tip from a Microsoft professional that I talked to, this Winter Break.

What I can do to prepare for these internship interviews is to make an appointment at CCA's Career Development Center for them to help me practice for interviews. I will do that tonight or tomorrow—for next week. I will ask them for ways I could answer these questions, type them down, and practice answering them whenever I have time.

My last goal was to get good grades for this class. I have to be honest. One of the ways I thought of fortifying this goal was to turn in homework a day before the deadline but my depression gets in the way. It is so frustrating. At times, I just want to leave certain situations; just avoid any worries in my life and go into a cocoon and have them all resolve themselves. I know this will never happen and there is so many expectations wanted of me. Though, I have turned in all my homework on time this week; even if it's the same day.

I have been making other efforts such as taking good notes during class and asking my classmates questions when I am confused.

[At this very moment, I overheard a therapy patient talk about my very problem. Of just wanting to go into this small and confined space and just avoid life. People may ignorantly judge you based on the outer perspective they have of someone with severe depression. They may believe that they are lazy, that they are awkward, and so on. I just wish they could step into my shoes and be empathetic. Even if they do not understand what I am going through.]

Distance Learning Research

Summary

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced students and teachers alike into this new online mode of education, which can have its bugs as in any other new process. For this project, I completed generative research to learn more about how distance learning has impacted student collaboration and connections—both synchronous and asynchronously—and find ways to improve upon these issues, for the next semester(s).

Kumari Pacheco and I were the only researchers.

Generative Research Experience

When finding interviewees for this research, we were looking for a diverse view of backgrounds. For example, gender, geographic location, and seniority in college. Since it was a quick week-long process of interviews, we were not really able to diversify the experience of majors.

Interviews were around 20 minutes long; mostly through Zoom, except for one phone call. I found it really effective to take notes with pen and paper since it was the most efficient way for me to articulate all of my notes and link commonalities when note-taking in real-time. As the interviewee was talking, I would write quick notes with abbreviations and would group things together using lines and arrows.

Once the interviews were over, I would write down my notes on sticky notes using Mural. I would attempt to simplify my notes but still give the essential information; organize them by proximity grouping and outline the ones that stand out the most. We were prompted to interview no more than three people of every gender so once we had all the interviews we needed, we were ready to start organizing all of our notes.

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Synthesis Process

Once we were done with interviewing and note-taking, we started synthesizing our process. First, we started clustering ideas with commonalities.

From this, we created an affinity map for these notes by labeling and filtering these clusters in a more sensible manner.

After, selected our top three issues that could be worked on for the upcoming semesters: time zones, workload, and alternate remote platforms. We chose these issues because they would not have to change the mentality of individuals, they were not subjective or divisive, and by fixing these issues, the rest of the problems would be solved.

We then organized these issues by a hierarchy of importance. Time zones seemed to be the most important since there is a large percentage of international students that seemed to be affected by their class schedules and national students included, with collaboration. The workload was second in importance because from what we noticed, a lot of the difficulties from our research stemmed from the number of assignments, managing time, collaboration, and lack of help. Lastly, alternate remote platforms were significant because it seemed like there was too much software to learn and use just to collaborate, manage their classes and assignments.

Finally, we stated the troubles people were having with the issue and formed it into a question which we would use to solve the problems.

Reflection

Through this online learning research assignment, I gathered a lot of valuable skills that I could use in future projects. For example, I learned the importance of diversifying the people you will interview because it provides you a wider range of information, which can reflect onto the people being helped by your product. With that, I learned that questions should be more open-ended since you do not want to gear your interviewee in a direction, thus, receiving more honest results. Also, having them expand on an answer was really useful because it can also spark more information out of their memory and more detailed information altogether. I also learned effective note-taking skills while interviewing to capture simplified and effectual notes. Finally, I learned how to synthesize the notes I took and organize them in ways that help me distinguish the most relevant problems to work on with the data I acquired.

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