Personal reflection
One thing needs to admit is that time goes really fast. After 12 weeks study, I learnt a lot through this useful and helpful course. At least I have my own website now. From two years study, I learnt that social media is now fast growing, and it will keep growing in the future. An understudied but fast-growing area of such analysis is the behavioural and psychological linguistic manifestations that make up who we are (Schwartz, 2015). The need of social media gives people chance to know others, and themselves.
As an advertising student, I used to believe that copywriting and creative ideas are more important in the process than any other steps like producing or editing. Obviously, now I changed my mind.
The first thing I learnt during these 12 weeks, was how to prepare for a video pitch. We need to rent equipment, prepare draft, memorize all the thing we will be doing for each one’s tasks. It is different, a ‘good’ different for me to know media industry more than just knowing how to be a copywriter. Filming the video needs more than 3 times for every one of us, and also wo changed the place for 2 times. Media industry is comprehensive, includes high working pressure and intensive working shift. It is a necessary step for me to go through, at least know well about how media works if I want to stay with my dreaming job.
I also learnt from our team how to organize the team work. For two team works, assignment 1 and assignment 3, I didn’t do things I am familiar with. Our team leader and members discussed 2 times to make sure everyone’s role in this task. Although I am studying advertising, I tried to do something different for this course. For example, I learnt how to set my own website. I enjoyed doing the second assignment. Because of time limited, I went to my friend and ask her questions that normally I won’t ask her. Thanks to this opportunity, I know something about her that I didn’t notice before. For the last assignment, my team leader told me how to link websites together, and how to use multiple websites to illustrate different aspects of our theme. I didn’t know much about filming before, through this course, I know images and elements for producing a complete short film.
The next thing is teamwork. When we have different opinions, we talk about advantages and disadvantages of each idea. It is a perfect timing to know well about the opposite aspect of the idea you are holding. And we always discuss our project on Messenger and ask each other how individual assignment goes. We met several hardships during this process, and we tried to help each other from different bachelor study background. It is nice to have team members like that.
For my personal working plan, I still prefer to do things related to copywriting or strategy planning. From what I learnt from this course, it helps me to know social media industry and website setting, digital elements. Through the process of knowing these, it will be helpful when I consider an impact or, analyse a media phenomenon. Website setting is simple but crucial. There are several touchpoints need to be considered for the preparation. Except considering target audience and analysing communication objectives, there are also outcomes and desire response need to discuss as well. The whole website should be either comprehensive, or one direction focused. In this case, I learnt how to think about my target audience, what do they want to see on my website. The whole website should be positive, useful and helpful for target audience. Providing useful information is one of the communication objectives for a website.
Another thing I found is helpful for my future career is to think further and deeper about a theme. When we discuss about the topic, we always want to make it wide and broad. But something more important is to make the topic to be more specific and narrowed. It is important to tell a story very detailed and narrowed, so that our target audience will know what exactly we are talking about. For my future career, I will be careful to think about a topic in a narrative and specific way.
This course helps me to know media more than just advertising. And I learnt a lot through doing 3 assignment and lectures. It will be a little bit different with what we will be facing in Chinese media industry and Australian media industry. But I will still try hard to use what I learnt from uni into practice. And I am looking forward to it.
Reference
Schwartz, H. Andrew, 2015, “Data-Driven Content Analysis of Social Media: A Systematic Overview of Automated Methods.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 659, no. 1, pp. 78–94.
