I enrolled in college back in 2012, right after I graduated high school. I truly had no idea what I was there for, I just knew that it was the next logical step on my life’s path. It was that uncertainty that made me take a step back from school and evaluate what it was that I wanted to do with my future. Now, almost ten years later, I am finishing my undergraduate education with a better sense of self and more concrete plans for my future. Although it has taken longer than I had hoped to finish my degree, I feel like the sacrifices I have made to complete my education have paid off. And though I may be joining the professional workforce later on than I had expected, I am doing so with a clearer path than I would have had I continued school without a real plan. My time at the University of Washington Bothell has allowed me to explore my interests as well as discover and learn about other areas of study I did not know were possible.

 

Graduating with a degree in Media and Communications Studies from UWB has prepared me to become a well-informed producer and consumer of media content both personally and professionally. Something I took away from this coursework was the importance of recognizing diversity and representation within media studies and production, in tandem with the power structures that influence these areas, in order to understand why and how media is produced in the ways it currently is. Through specific coursework, I believe that I have learned and been able to put into practice necessary skills for working within a media and/or communications-focused field. By building upon and specializing within the learning objectives of the school of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences such as research and analysis, and critical thinking, the MCS major has given me the opportunity to apply and study these objectives with respect to my own field. As an interdisciplinary degree, the coursework within the MCS major relies on the incorporation and synthesis of materials and information from within differing areas of study in order to achieve well-rounded and informed takeaways. 

 

One of the more emphasized learning objectives within the MCS major is the ability to research and analyze information throughout varying fields of study, focusing on the ways in which they inform and build upon one another. In my portfolio, the piece that I feel exemplifies this is the essay entitled Mental Health Impacts of Communities Affected by Wildfire, that I wrote for my Advanced Seminar which focused on the effects of climate change and emotional well-being. I chose to write about the ways in which people in frontline communities are impacted by wildfires, focusing specifically on mental health and wellbeing as a direct result of these fires, because at the time of writing the paper my grandmother’s home was being threatened by raging Oregon wildfires. Since this specific field is relatively new, I had to rely on research and information from sources outside of the scope of ecological grief and anxiety. I found myself drawing mainly from physiological studies and ecological data, as well as literature from top researchers in the field. Knowing that I could not just use resources from the field of ecological grief and anxiety, as the pool of resources are relatively small, I knew that this paper would be more effective if I included varying outside resources, and explored key terms that would enhance and justify the points I was trying to make and the questions I was looking to answer. This paper demonstrates my ability to utilize the resources within the UW library system, and navigate its vast breadth of information. The ability and skills needed for research, whether academic or otherwise, are necessary in order to ascertain truthful, unbiased knowledge, which in our age of digital misinformation is vital. The skills I have learned throughout my undergraduate career have built upon and strengthened one another; I would not have been able to conduct and synthesize my research in such a strong and creative way without the application of critical thinking.

 

Critical thinking is a skill that we are constantly refining over time, so the ability to learn and hone this skill within an educational landscape is important in establishing a strong understanding of critical thinking practices. To think critically is to identify and evaluate an issue, in order to make an accurate assumption. As a Media and Communications Studies major, I have had to employ critical and creative thinking methods in a vast array of classes, as many of these classes have challenged me to question and explore new ideas as well as inherent prejudice and biases. Specifically for myself, and within my major, critical thinking has been an important skill to have especially when learning about the practices and history of media and communication technologies, and how they impact us today. Using this knowledge, I created the images below for a project entitled "Modern Recreations of Historic Photojournalism," with specific regard to the motivations and practices of photojournalists in both the 1800s and 1960s.