Reflections

Introduction

Who Am I?

In the Reflections unit, we considered the overarching question “Who am I?” We developed insights about ourselves through writing our personal statement and a lyrical essay in English, creating a video about our perspective about a certain topic in Digital Media, and creating a variety of different art pieces in Design, one of which juxtaposes two different images and displays them together so that they are in conversation. The common thread throughout our classes was that the work we did was introspective and encouraged us to reflect on our experiences and relate them to the world around us.

I valued getting the opportunity to take a step back and reflect a bit about myself. Especially with it being college application season, I found it beneficial to focus on something applicable to my other responsibilities as well. Through this unit, I also learned more about myself. My values and the things important to me became more evident through the assignments I completed for Freestyle.

English

Personal Essay

The Personal Essay was the first major assignment we worked on this year. In this assignment, we had to write an essay based on one of four models given in the book College Essay Essentials. I chose to model mine off of the structure for students who had gone through challenges but didn’t know what they wanted to study. After deciding this, I completed a variety of brainstorming activities to organize my thoughts. I knew I wanted to write about my ethnicity, so I chose to put a magnifying glass on one specific example, which was my name. Because my essay is essentially about my name, I feel that I answered the question, “Who am I?” pretty well. The core values were a bit hard to get across, but I feel like I managed and because the essay is so vulnerable, I think it does show who I am.

The first roll call of the year was always the roughest. The slight break in the succession of names was always how I knew I was next. Some teachers would bravely tackle the jumble of letters on their clipboard, mangling it with confidence, while others would pause and apologetically admit defeat before carefully sounding it out. Two options were presented: correct him or her politely and have the good-intentioned but futile back-and-forth of, “Is this right?” and “Not exactly,” or run with the deflated Americanized alternative proposed. More often than not, I picked the latter.

My name is Amruta, and unless you’re South Asian or have been exposed to South Asian languages, you probably wouldn’t know how to say that. It’s okay, though, as my name has certain sounds that don’t exist in the English alphabet; sometimes I’m not even sure how to say it. Unfortunately, the beauty the three Devanagari characters that form my name effortlessly conveys is lost in translation and fails to surface in the straightforward, six-letter alternative – the way most people know me – but that’s the cost of avoiding a painfully awkward situation.

In elementary school, I was too shy to correct someone if they said my name incorrectly. “Is it.. am-ROO-tah?” teachers would inquire during roll call, and I would simply nod. But hearing my name the “American” way made me cringe, so by middle school, I mustered the courage to ask others to say it like my parents did. “It’s UM-roo-thah. Like there’s an ‘h’ after the ‘t,’ and you kinda have to roll the ‘r,’” I would explain, but most people quickly gave up.

One incident I vividly remember was when a teacher jokingly called me ‘Amelia’ instead of ‘Amruta’ and laughed like it wasn’t an intentional mistake. “I Anglicized your name,” he chortled. After quickly realizing the majority of people would put minimal effort into learning how to say my name correctly, I began to resent my parents for neglecting all the easy and ethnic names they could have given me, like ‘Aria’ or ‘Veena.’ But I was stuck with ‘Amruta.’

By the time I got to high school, my name had been mispronounced for so long that it didn’t even bother me anymore. The “American” version of my name became second nature and I had come to the conclusion that I would much rather avoid an awkward altercation than insist people say it properly.

Just this past summer, I attended a pre-college program across the country and decided to put ‘Ruth’ as the preferred name on my application, as it technically stemmed from my real name. For the first time, I was not trapped in the three-syllable realm of ‘Amruta.’ I was amazed at how easy introductions were; everyone knew how to say ‘Ruth.’ The confusion was clearly written on most people’s faces once again though, this time because my new American nickname didn’t match my dark skin and Indian features, but I didn’t care. I had made everyone’s lives so much easier.

However, it didn’t take long before I started to hate Ruth. I felt like I’d lost a part of my identity and erasing my ethnicity and heritage like that made me uncomfortable. My name is tied so closely to my culture and just because other people were inconvenienced by it didn’t mean I had to be. The subtle racial microaggressions I felt from others had made me feel like I needed to “normalize” myself, which nobody else should ever have to feel.

I rode out those three weeks at pre-college, and once I came back home, I finally felt like myself again. ‘Am-ROO-tah’ is just as much a part of me as ‘UM-roo-thah,’ and a flat American accent is just as good as a perfect pronunciation. Even though they’re so different from each other, they both make up important parts of my identity and I wouldn’t give up either.

Digital Media

Perspective Piece

For the Perspective Piece, we were instructed to write a rant about a topic of our choice for one to two minutes and then record it and turn it into a video with visuals. I decided to write mine about gun control because it’s an extremely important topic that I have strong feelings about. After I recorded myself saying it, I picked out visuals that I thought correlated well with what I was talking about and created a video of the audio and images with After Effects. I added a Ken Burns effect to the visuals, some music to complement the rant, and then rendered out my video. I think that this assignment revealed to me what I really care about and made my values more apparent.

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Screenshot of my Perspective Piece video in After Effects
Screenshot of my Perspective Piece video in After Effects

Design

Aboriginal Art

For the Aboriginal Art project, we were instructed to pick an animal to paint with only small dots, like pointillism but with paint. Additionally, the goal was not to make the animal realistic but to replicate the traditional Aboriginal art style, which was minimalistic and focused on shape and only a few colors.

My completed aboriginal piece
Final Aboriginal Artwork

This production took a ridiculous amount of time to create, mainly because acrylic paint is a medium I’m not super familiar with and because stippling in general is a time-consuming process. I started out by drawing a rough reference image with Sharpies in my sketchbook.

Rough draft of my Aboriginal Art
Rough draft of my Aboriginal Art

This project was valuable to me as it gave me the opportunity to create something in a medium and style I was not accustomed to. I always love getting the opportunity to try something new and step out of my comfort zone, which made this assignment more enjoyable for me. Additionally, I’m a super detail-oriented person, so while this piece took forever to create, it was really satisfying to get all the little details right.

Alphabet Photos

For this project, we were tasked with going outside and finding objects and things that looked like letters. Some letters were tougher than others, but eventually, I was able to find a suitable image for each letter.

After finding all the letters, we put the photos together to form our first name in Photoshop. Here is what mine looks like:

Collages

Magazine Collage

The purpose of this project was to limit how much control we had over the subjects of our artwork. We were given magazines and told to find two pages to be the background, and they couldn’t be from the same spread. I found two that would blend into each other well and one that I could seamlessly hide. After that, I found a bunch of other images that I thought looked interesting and pieced them together. Once I found a good layout, I glued everything down and then scanned it for the next collage.

Abstract Collage Art

For this collage, I took the scan of the first collage and traced the outlines of the major shapes. This was an exercise in tints, tones, and shades as well as shape, and so I chose to use the tints, tones, and shades of a yellow-green.

Digital Collage

The final collage we did has nothing to do with the first two, but this college looked a lot better in my opinion, because I was able to google images of things that would work together well. I was also able to edit the colors to make it more cohesive.

Initially, I created a collage morgue where I put all of the images I found from the Internet and then started the placement. The bottom half was a mountain range image I found, but I edited it to be purple. I placed varying sizes of purple popsicles and edited the colors of each to match the colors of the mountain. I then went in with the blend tool and blended the ends of the sticks into the mountains. As you can probably tell, the theme of the piece is sugar, so since part of the assignment was to add type to the image, I placed the word sugar three times and made them match the colors of the section of the mountain they were in so it would look more cohesive.