My Learning Journal

Introduction

In this essay, I will be presenting how I carried out my practice project with my client Aphasia Ireland. The main contents covered were, my main tasks within the team, the challenges I encountered in my work and how I overcame them, and what I felt and gained from the module and the project.

 

Personal Experiences

As a charitable organization, most of the staff in the team are part-time or student volunteers. Especially in our social media team, including my team leader, Dolina, the other three or four members are student volunteers from all over the world. Under Dolina's leadership, we organized a WhatsApp group where we discussed all social media tasks and sometimes exchanged technical questions on poster design. Typically, we have a regular meeting once a month via Zoom to share a general overview of the month's work and highlights of the month's services. Dolina will make a social media calendar at the end of the month for the next month, and each member just has to go and claim the dates and projects they can serve on. The main part of my job is to create posters on specific topics and also to do some simple replies on the Facebook community.

Before that, I had absolutely no experience with Canva to create a post, so I felt a little bit of pressure. But I think my strength is drawing, and I used to hand draw posters for my school when I was a teacher there, so I do not think I should have any problem with aesthetics and artistic ability. So I used my spare time to find some tutorials on YouTube about this software, and after practicing on my own for a while I started creating my themed posters.

However, in the process of actually creating the posts, I have also discovered some problems and gained experience. For example, for some posters, if they involve donations, they usually need to be released in the morning before public working hours; if they involve lectures and counseling, they need to be released two to three days in advance, so as to make it easier for the needy audience to arrange their time to participate.

And in terms of the creation itself, since this is a team creation for a group, at the beginning I think I somewhat overlooked some of the necessary consistency. One thing that struck me was that I was so preoccupied with my own creation that I overlooked the consistent background colour of the posters. Dolina then reminded me privately of this detail, as the design of the poster would lose the recognizability of our organization if we did not all agree on a particular detail. And on top of this same background, you can have your own creative freedom. After a while, I found myself comfortable using the software's templates and my own creative inspirations, combining many social media strategies such as text, hashtags, posting times, etc., to create posters that met the platform's requirements. It was this experience that played a huge role in my subsequent marketing internship with a travel company. It is also in social media strategy that I know how to get the most out of social media posters while retaining and even highlighting brand recognition and capturing the themes that the company wants to market and promote.

 

Strengths and Areas for Improvement

With my basic art skills and aesthetic ability, my work in design is always praised. But completing the design through the software was a bit of a challenge for me. It is a purely technical challenge that requires me to learn and practice on my own. However, I am glad I chose this project because I soon realized that learning by doing is the fastest way to progress. Also, the experience of some of the practical coursework in UCD Communication and Media courses helped me a lot with the MMP project. Once we had a member who needed to make short videos for the Ins platform, I provided her with a lot of help in editing the videos because I have experience recording podcasts and interviews in previous assignments. For the task of designing charity T-shirts, I also applied the concept of group work in my UXD course and gave a lot of positive help to the teamwork.

Of course, I think there are still parts of my work that I need to improve, especially social media text writing. In this regard, I have also revealed some of my shortcomings in using the language as a non-native English speaker. Sometimes I think I need to grasp some of the characteristics of social media platforms and make some adjustments to the style of the text in relation to the theme of the poster. But I'm trying to make up for this deficiency by comparing and learning from other bloggers in the same genre of texts.

But for my MMP, I think the most helpful thing is my information searching skills and communication skills within the team. For example, regarding setting up a social media calendar, I found a very interesting and useful website called National Today (https://nationaltoday.com/) to help me spot some special days. While working with these enthusiastic volunteers, I also learnt how to work and communicate with people from different cultures and present my own views, which is also a very important part for an international student.

 

Conclusion

As it happens, my MMP project was about posters and social media strategy, which managed to help me find a subsequent internship in the marketing department that was a great match. Throughout my projects, I have fully utilized and enhanced my art layout skills, information searching skills, and new media software learning skills. Whether it be Canva for poster production or Squarespace for my graduation design, neither my disciplinary background nor my past career background required me to use these softwares before I was introduced to the module in UCD.

In a way, that is why I chose to come here to study. My fellow students and Aphasia Ireland volunteers, many of whom are already working in the media and film industry, have taught me about the workings of social media platforms through their interactions and work with them. I was not good at using these design softwares before, but now after all these assignments, and the media management project, I realize that it is not that hard to learn, but I am getting better at it in practice.

But most importantly, I learnt to communicate with people from different cultural and professional backgrounds through this course and programme. I also learnt a lot of technical skills and strategies. All of this helped me secure my first internship in marketing. What's more rewarding is that I'm working for a charitable organization, which has given me a better understanding of how to be a voice for a group of people who need help.