Marcelo Urieta Bravo – Semester Reflection of Grades of GDES_1

My goal for expert hours has been 8 hours per week since the semester started. I am a Communication Major and Graphic Design Minor student who is heavily involved in extracurricular activities; I am currently serving as the Governor for the Texas-Oklahoma District of Circle K International (CKI). As Governor, I am responsible for overseeing the daily activities of about 400+ CKI members and 10 district officers. I also work for the Dean of Students at St. Edward’s University and for the Office of Student Life at the ACC South Austin Campus. With that being said, it is sometimes very difficult for me to fulfill my expert hours and meet my class’s expectations. However, after seeing that I was short on my expert hour goal after my mid-semester essay, I started making positive changes to my lifestyle, like prioritizing, in order to have a balance between my classes, extracurricular activities, jobs, and ultimately fulfill the expert hour goal that I set for myself. I was about 5 hours short of my goal after the mid-semester essay, where as now, I am 5 hours above my goal. This is partly due to the option that opened up at my ACC Student Life job where I got the opportunity to work with the marketing team as well as my own graphic design contributions to both Circle K International and other extracurricular activities.  I did not attend any of the expert hour opportunities offered outside of class due to schedule complications, but it is something that I look forward to taking advantage of in the future.

The first dimension that I will evaluate myself on is my social and emotional development both inside and outside of the GDES classroom. Looking back to the beginning of the semester, I’ve experienced so much growth in these two aspects. I feel like I am at the mature stage (in control) because I learned how to balance both stages. In all of my classes and activities, I have constantly expressed my feelings and ideas. When it came down to giving feedback to other classmates, I was very comfortable and I gave meaningful feedback.  I also looked forward to receiving feedback for my work because it helped me make it better. For example, when I had my first draft of my directions map, I was missing a lot of the necessary aspects for people to understand it and my fellow students and the professor helped me see that. I took their feedback and I added and changed information to make it more legible and easy to understand. Also, I still manage to get 8 hours of sleep, which helps me be energized to complete my daily tasks, attend class, do homework, and be actively participating in class, which also contributes to my maturing stage.

Secondly, I will evaluate the sophistication of my work. When I did my mid-semester essay, I rate the sophistication of my work as a medium (aware), because I was just starting this class and didn’t have enough skill to sophisticate my work. However, now that we are so close to the end, I feel like the sophistication of my work has increased to meet the “high” expectations. Although the initial drafts of my projects are nowhere near being sophisticated, I use feedback, the software taught in class, and my professor’s expertise to improve my work. I find this dimension to be the hardest of them to rate myself all because I am not necessarily sure what it means to produce “sophisticated” work, but based on the hierarchy, cohesion, legibility, and understandability of the three maps I designed for this class, I feel like this support the sophistication of my work. I am also very pleased with the way each map turned out. I do understand that there is so much more that can be done to improve the sophistication of my work and as I move on taking more graphic design course, I hope to have a better understanding of how to make my work better and continuing improving it.

Thirdly, just like I said on my mid-semester essay, I believe that my interpretation of use of feedback is meaningful. I am very detail oriented and I pay closely attention to every comment/suggestion that has been said about my work because I always want to make it better. For example, with my graphs spread, I was not confident with my first initial drafts because I felt like I needed to do more…but didn’t know what. When it came down to the critique, I was open for feedback and I was writing everything down on my notebook in order to make changes and improve my spread. Thanks to the feedback from my classmates and the professor, I was able to “sophisticate” my spread making it my best map in my opinion.

I strongly believe that the level of challenge to myself is intense. Since I had experience making symbols, I feel like I didn’t challenge myself enough when that assignment came about. But as we moved through the semester and we started doing the maps, something that I hadn’t done before, I felt the need to challenge myself in order to learn and produce great work. I am usually my toughest critic because I know that I am capable of doing great things; for example, when we did the decision-making map, I had no idea on what to do or how to even start. But I spent a lot of time coming up with the main idea and possible scenarios. I knew that this was something new to me and therefore I needed use this as a learning experience while challenging myself to learn different tools, like the live trace option. Also, for the info graphic, I had to do some outside of the classroom research in order to collect the data and necessary information to complete this map. It is important to note that during my mid-semester essay, I gave my level of challenge to myself a “medium,” but after successfully completing the maps assignment, I felt that my challenge level increased to intense because I needed to work on something that I had no prior knowledge.

When it comes to my contribution to the climate, I believe that it was at room temperature. As I reflect on this, I am a bit disappointed since I didn’t improve on this since my mid-semester essay. I do feel like I contribute positively to the classroom climate by participating in group and individual critics, but I still struggle with asking more questions and participating more in class. I was also absent three days since the mid-semester essay happened. However, even when I don’t attend class, I make sure to talk to my classmates to make sure that I am up to date with everything that needs to be done for the next class period so I can be prepared. I am hopeful that in future semesters, I will improve my attendance and also be actively participating in all my classes.

Lastly, for the use of practice time, I am consistent. After the mid-semester essay, I have been successfully dedicating 8 hours a week to this particular class so I can successfully achieve my expert hour goal. I know this is a low number, but I have many things on my plate and I am very busy. However, even when I am working, I manage to put in practice everything that I have been learning in my graphic design classes. My bosses and even my fellow club members come to me so I can help them design flyers, t-shirts, etc. In this GDES class, when it came down to major assignments or finalizing a project, I made sure to spend more time working and improving the project. I do struggle with having enough time in a day to get things done, but it has not been an issue for this class. I always have my assignments ready by the deadline. So far, I am ending the semester with 117/10,000 expert hours. I look forward to continuing my journey to become a graphic design expert.

To conclude, in almost every category of this evaluation I was able to improve from my mid-semester essay. Looking back and reflecting on my work, I feel like I was able to use the feedback provided from my classmates and new tools to sophisticate my work and be pleased with the way they turned-out.  I also feel like I’ve grown as a designer throughout this course and I am more confortable stepping our of my comfort zone. When someone is asked to grade themselves, I feel like they automatically go for the highest grade, in this case an A, however, I feel like I do deserve an A because I’ve worked extremely hard in this class and I’ve met the expectations, and in some cases, I even exceeded the expectations.  The six aspects that we were asked to evaluate ourselves on, truly symbolize everything that we were exposed throughout this class and I feel that each aspect helped be grow and understand how to improve my own work. Although this class has come to an end, I am looking forward to continuing with my expert hours so I can complete my goal of 10,000 hours in 26 years. I know that it takes a lot of work to be a good graphic designer, and I am willing to continue to work tirelessly to be a great graphic designer. I am proud of the work that I’ve done, so here are my final maps for this course: