Multimedia arts have been a passion of my for years. It first started when I was younger, drawing my own characters and designs, and it’s slowly evolved into a collection of different mediums such as music and video editing. I have gotten better and better from that point on, and had a lot of fun doing so. When I first started my co-op position with the Communications department at Antioch College, I was worried these skills wouldn’t come in handy. Social media isn’t just about posting images and videos everyday, it’s about keeping follower engagement and getting something interesting out there, isn’t it? That’s what I initially thought.
Starting my position, I met Mary Evans, the current Events & Social Media Manager. If you know me personally, you’d know I suffer from a lot of social anxiety, so it felt like a challenge to meet someone in person—especially after so long durning the pandemic in which much of our work became virtual and, admittedly, I am a bit homebound. But the day I did meet her, it was really nice! We talked and had a few good chuckles. Mary is a social justice activist, and uses her platform to provide space for underrepresented communities, most notably incarcerated individuals. As a trans woman who came out early last year, and a social justice advocate myself, I have a lot of respect for her and her work. Overall I think this is an aspect about Antioch in general: how accepting the community we have truly is. It’s made me feel a lot more comfortable to be myself. While it’s far from conquering social anxiety, opening up to at least one person in close proximity to me instead of just online folks is a pretty good start. I’m proud of my progress.
When it comes to this work, I’ve been going back and forth between old and new. What I mean by this is that the work I’ve been doing has been letting my use my skills in video and photo editing, while still giving me new things to keep me on my toes, which I enjoy. One new tool I’ve been learning to use is Canva, an Australian graphic design platform, used to create social media graphics and other visual content. Mary introduced me to this tool a while back, and it’s been really nice to use for what I’m doing, considering my initial idea was to do everything in my animation program of choice. Using Canva has definitely helped me structure things better in my own personal projects too, which has been a huge plus.
One video project I worked on this co-op that I think is the most notable is titled Reunion 2021 Alumni Association Awards: J.D. Dawson Award Recipient Peter Townsend. It is the first video project I’ve worked on that features subtitles, and it was a really interesting a new experience. The link to the video can be found HERE.
Overall this co-op position has slowly been helping me both get out of my shell, and learn to just be and feel comfortable with myself. It’s definitely gonna be a journey that probably stretches out past co-op. But for sure, this term has given me a huge boost in motivation and inspiration. I would humbly like to thank Mary Evans, as well as Luisa Bieri for giving me this opportunity, and helping me find a co-op option that both makes me feel comfortable, and let’s me step out of my bubble. To me at least, it seems like an impossible task, but she managed to pull through and find something I could do.
Photo credit: Antioch College Community Day winter 2022 from Antioch’s Twitter feed – https://twitter.com/AntiochCollege/status/1493669549522100226/photo/1
