Introduction

Many creative projects were introduced during the reflections unit this year in all of the Freestyle classes. We worked on creative and narrative writing in English, and learned how to further enhance our Adobe application knowledge in both Design and Digital Media.

In English, we were encouraged to work on our Common App personal essay as an introduction to the reflections unit. We spent a couple weeks learning how to work on writing an effective and impactful essay. Eventually, we transitioned to the Lyrical Essay, where we changed our writing to be about someone else’s experiences versus just our own. We were challenged to write from the perspective of someone else, and how they identify themselves.

In Digital Media, students were assigned a big mandala project. The mandala project was meant to ultimately help us reflect on ourselves as people and also the world we live in. We were taught not only how to create a symmetrical looking mandala, but were also given immense creative freedom with this project. Afterwards, we were given the perspective project, which was an assignment directed towards anything we wanted to say to the world. We were able to write for about a 2min piece on anything we wanted to talk about. Meanwhile, in between the big projects, we were given smaller projects like learning different techniques in Adobe After Effects.

In my elective class, Design, our first couple projects were meant to re introduce us into ways of design thinking. We spent some time working on shading and drawing with pastels, macro photography, and street photography. We then transitioned into the main project, which was a public service announcement. Along with our personal essay, we worked on the PSA to explain a point of view to the community related to a lesson we learned/wrote about.

Overall, learning and working on these many projects in all three classes gave me a better perspective and sense of who I am as a person. I was able to recognize hardships I have gotten through, and was also able to sit down and re-hash happier times in my life that made an impact on me. Writing the personal essay and working on the assignment, ‘Object List’ below, I was able to show exactly who I am as a person through my art and writing.

The list below is of objects that remind me of who I am. This was a homework assignment given to us in English.

  • pink swimsuit
  • taco salad
  • the smell of nail polish
  • greys anatomy
  • rubber duckies
  • sunsets on the beach
  • water
  • university club of palo alto