This senior capstone course has been a huge help this semester in setting me up for success in the future. I gained a lot of knowledge on how to interview for jobs, what my resume and portfolio should look like, creating my personal professional brand, gained an amazing mentor, and lastly learned more about myself and what I want to do after I graduate.
I would say one of these things was the most helpful for me but honestly, they were all things I truly needed and am so glad I learned. Having a portfolio was something I knew I needed to have but never got around to it because I didn’t even know where to begin. This class was the push and help I needed to create my web portfolio along with my graphic design capstone. My resume definitely needed some revising and editing and the advice I received from Carol and the class was very helpful in making my resume better for future job searching.
I loved that we were able to come up with our own creative project. This allowed me to be able to create my personal logo for my professional brand. I had a lot of fun doing it and it is something I needed. Lastly, I am so glad Carol was able to help us find the perfect matched mentors for us. My mentor has been such an amazing help to me figuring out where I want to see myself in the near future. Not only that, but she is a great connection to have outside of Creighton. The mentor matching is definitely something I think Carol should keep in this course because I found it very helpful in so many ways.
I can confidently say leaving this class that I feel a lot more prepared for my future in being successful and in getting a job in a career field that I like. I feel that I now have all the tools that I need for after I graduate from Creighton. I am excited to see where my future takes me thanks to everything I gained and learned from this course.
I had a conversation with one of my roommates. He is a teacher at an elementary school and normally has a few stories about his day with his students. This time he had a particularly difficult day with some of his students.
I am someone who enjoys talking with others but, also I tend to be the one talking a lot in the conversations. So, for this conversation with my roommate I focused on really listening and not trying to bring in my own personal experiences to relate with his. I was able to get a lot of information about his day and his story. Also, it can be really easy to start to multi-task while having a conversation with someone. I know personally, I really don’t like when people clearly aren’t in the conversation with me. I’d rather them just not be in the conversation at all, just like Celeste Headlee mentioned in her TED talk. Being present is important because, then you really are hearing what they are saying.
Instead of focusing on what I was going to say next to what he said, I just focused on listening to him and the responses just came naturally. I could tell he felt heard and that I was really engaging in our conversation. Sometimes, you don’t realize how good it feels to have someone truly be in the conversation with you. Nowadays people are so occupied with a million other things going on in their own lives they tend to not fully engage in their conversations with others and are only halfway in and halfway out.
This exercise opened my eyes to having more engaged and interesting conversations. I had a great conversation with my roommate that night because, I was fully in it and it made my responses so much more meaningful. It also showed me that you don’t always have to share your experience too after their done telling theirs. I was able to takeaway a great conversation from this experience and hopefully have many more in the future.
I really appreciated Bridget Thoreson’s view on one’s professional journey. I agree with her in that thinking of my career as climbing a ladder is stressful and it puts a lot of pressure myself. Thinking of my journey like a river makes the journey not seem so bad. This way of thinking shows you there is no wrong way to go, just different ways.
I liked when Thoreson said “When your professional destination is no longer a lonely perch but a thriving, wide-open ecosystem fed by the work of others to explore, every twist and turn in your journey changes from a liability to a strength.” The river analogy makes you think positively rather than negative thoughts. Sometimes when I run into an issue, I start to think only about the issue and not how I am going to conquer it. I don’t want to have to feel like I have to break glass ceilings on my career journey. I want to feel like any path I take is okay as long as I am still moving, growing, and learning.
I think the Kawa model is a great and easy way to see your journey in a different way. You don’t want to feel stuck and like there’s nowhere else to go. This model makes you understand that your journey has so many different paths it can take and I really like that. I am someone who, when they get stressed out it’s hard to think about anything else besides being stressed. The Kawa model is a perfect way to show people like me that challenges are all just a part of the journey and that everything will be okay.
Thinking about beginning my professional journey has become more and more intimidating the closer it has gotten but, this article reminded me that my journey is MY journey and nobody else’s. I can take it at my own pace and enjoy where my path takes me. I won’t follow a straight line from point A to B, because that’s not who I am. This website that Thoreson mentioned in her article, talks about how it is okay to not have one detailed and specific career goal but, to allow yourself to work at doing what you love and see where it takes you. This made me feel better about my journey and taught me that it’s okay to not have an exact idea of what I want to do. This opens up so many opportunities for me. Having an open mind in life will allow me to have experiences I would never get to have if I only wanted to take one specific path and nothing else. All that being said, I am exciting to begin my professional journey and see where it takes me!
I enjoyed doing the elevator pitch because I learned how to be precise and to the point while speaking. I have never been very good at getting to the point when telling stories and while doing an elevator pitch, time is of the essence. According to a career helping website, “Your elevator speech should be brief. Restrict the speech to 30-60 seconds.” I also know that I tend to speak fast when talking in general, so I tried really hard to slow it down a bit and annunciate my words. This helped me keep my thoughts in order and within the time frame.
Another career related site said to “Identify Your Goal. Start by thinking about the objective of your pitch.” I think that it also helped a lot that I had a goal in my elevator pitch, so I wasn’t just rambling, but I spoke with purpose. While we did both the elevator pitch by recording and in person, I think I prefer in person. I was able to re-record myself if I messed up, which I liked but in real life you aren’t able to do that, so that’s why I prefer in person. I also feel more natural when speaking to an actual person rather than to a computer screen where I am looking at myself.
The most helpful piece of advice was to just to pause if I need to think instead of saying like or um which I know I tend to do. I also liked hearing that the specific stats numbers I put in there was helpful to hear. I think I had a lot of great information that was well thought out in my elevator pitch, that would hopefully get me an interview. Something I think that I could work on is just to relax if I mess up or stumble on my words and to continue speaking. Overall, I think it was a great learning experience that will help me in the future.
Bobbi Brown had quite the experience getting to where she is today. It started off with her being inspired by her mother doing her makeup when she was growing up. Bobbi never felt glamourous like her mother though. The thing that changed her outlook on life was when she saw the movie Love Story with Ali MacGraw. It was the first time she saw someone who was successful look like her (more average and simple). Bobbi then saw herself as someone who could be pretty too.
Bobbi eventually went to college at the University of Arizona, but she didn’t enjoy it and found it boring. She talked to her mother about it where she decided to pursue something that she was truly interested in and that was makeup. Bobbi found Emerson college where they allowed her to create her own major and that’s where she studied makeup. There is where she discovered herself and learned all about entrepreneurial skills. She ended up studying to become a theatre makeup artist. A month before she graduates from college Bobbi is reading a magazine where she sees an article about a freelance artist that does makeup for models and fashion shows. Bobbi is intrigued by this and becomes in contact with this artist’s agent. Bobbi decides to move to New York while she is in contact with this agent. She starts to get jobs assisting people who do makeup for the T.V.
While Bobbi was doing all of this, these jobs weren’t able to pay her bills, but she did have help from her lawyer father who gave her $500 a month for rent. She then realized that she needed to stop sticking to a budget and start thinking how she was actually going to be able to start making money. Bobbi started filling her days with work and more bookings. She started to make more connections and build relationships with people. She was also unique. The thing that made her special was that she always did peoples makeup natural and “nude” which was the complete opposite of what people knew. Her work started to become noticed, and people liked it.
Bobbi then began to advertise and make more connections. In 1990 she started to create her own makeup. She met a pharmacist who made lipsticks of his own. She shared her idea of a nude or lip colored lipstick and the chemist agreed to make it for her. They began to work together. Bobbi used her connections and talked to the beauty editor of Glamour magazine and an article was written about her lipsticks. Bergdorf eventually got in contact with Bobbi and decided to sell her lipsticks which was a huge success. Her business began to grow and so she started to have friends who became business partners, including her husband. Bobbi’s makeup line became multiple makeup products and she began selling to bigger companies.
She eventually became known as a beauty expert on the Today Show because she wrote a book on cosmetics which helped put her brand and herself on the map. Large companies began to contact her to buy her company. She finally landed on Estee Lauder who bought her company for a large amount while she was still able to do all of her creative work with the brand while they did all the stuff she found boring, like finances.
Bobbi still feels like today she made the right decision because they grew her company with huge success. She loved her work for about 15 out of the 22 years she worked there but eventually she felt like she lost control with it. Business became difficult and she started hating going to work. She knew she wanted to be in charge and wanted to lead and that she could no longer deal with the stress of the business anymore, so she took a step back and parted with the company. She felt happy again and that there was a huge weight lifted off her shoulders.
Bobbi’s experience of being an entrepreneur showed me a few things. The first is that you need to love what you are doing. Loving the work that you do will lead to success because it’s something you look forward to doing. The second thing is that you need to take an initiative. If you just stick to the same thing you have been doing just to get by you aren’t going to get anywhere. Bobbi reached out to people, she changed schools, she looked for new learning experiences, and she looked for work connections. Lastly, I learned that relationships and connections are key. By reaching out to people she started to connect with them and build relationships that helped her business down the road. Without all these other people that helped her down the line, she wouldn’t have gotten to where she is today.
Something that I did notice though while listening to Bobbi’s story was that some of the experiences that she had were possible because she did have financial help from her family. I think that allowed her to live where she needed to be while not having to worry too much about how she was going to afford it. While money was able to help her a little bit, I know she was able to make her business on her own. She connected, she was unique and didn’t listen to the haters, she stuck to her gut and went for what she wanted. My largest takeaway from Bobbi’s story was to not give up and work towards your goals because they can be accomplished if you just do it. Make that call, send that email, and create those connections.
Creativity can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. A good way to see what your creative type is, is by taking the Adobe Creative Type quiz. After taking this unique quiz I found out that my creative type was the Innovator. After reading what the Innovator encompasses, I have to say there are some things that I agree with and some things that I don’t think quite fit me.
An Innovator’s strengths are that they are able to come up with new ideas and innovative solutions. I think that is something that I am good at. I love to come up with new and creative ideas and I always want figure out how to make things work when there might be a hiccup in the idea. An Innovators untapped potential is the art of executing ideas. I feel like this is partially me because I have so many extravagant ideas that come to my mind, but I don’t always go through with them. The ideas normally just stay ideas and don’t become much more. On the other hand, if I do start one of my creative ideas, I stick to it and see my idea through all the way.
Another key part to an Innovator is that they love and are always open to change. Personally, I don’t think I do very well with change and have always struggled with it. Though, I do think as I have gotten older and have entered the creative field that I had to be open to change and have gotten much better at it. Being a part of the creative field means you have to be open to new ideas and new ways of improving your projects. I know that the more I continue my journey in the creative field I will continue to open up to change and embrace it.
I love to think outside of the box, which is part of being an Innovator. They love to take risks and use their unique creativity. Something, that was said in my results was that I need to learn how to enjoy the “messy middle” parts of the project and I liked that. I know sometimes I get wrapped up in the excitement of the idea at the beginning and by time I get to the middle part I start to get bored or frustrated. Then I just start to look towards the end result, which is always exciting, but I do need to learn how to appreciate the middle of the process just as much.
Creativity is not only an important part of my career path, but it essentially is my career path. On a psychology site that I found they said, “Creativity encompasses the ability to discover new and original ideas, connections, and solutions to problems.” I think that’s why I love creativity so much, because it allows you to use your originality while connecting with others. I am excited to see where my creativity mind takes me in the future.
Entrepreneur is a word that is used so broadly nowadays. We hear this word used quite often but what is being an entrepreneur really?
In technical terms, “An entrepreneur is someone with a market-driven pursuit of a conceptual idea, who seeks a viable business model that succeeds in a target market” (Jan Schaffer). In other words an entrepreneur is someone who is willing to take a risk but a calculated risk to achieve an idea of theirs successfully.
Another word that is similar and is often mistaken as the same thing is an intrapreneur. In technical terms, “An intrapreneur is an employee who innovates and thinks entrepreneurially to develop new lines of business, programs or products within an existing organization or corporation” (Jan Schaffer). This is someone who works like an entrepreneur but gets to do this within an already established business.
Growing up I was always coming up with new fun ideas for a business or a new creation. Often I would do this with my mom and till this day we still both do this. Now that I am emerged in an environment that is teaching me how to succeed in being an entrepreneur I know that I can turned these ideas of mine into reality.
I know that in the world we live in things are constantly changing and if you want to be an entrepreneur you have to be able to keep up with all the new and latest social media platforms and be up to date on all the new technology. This is a key thing in being successful in this business. In this article about entrepreneurship it talks about how you must constantly change in order to continue growing your business. “Change To Grow: A desire to increase customer base, improve performance, or pursue expansion strategies requires entrepreneurs to change. The appetite for success is ever-present” (Gregory Wallace).
I also know that you have to work hard in the world of entrepreneurship. That being said even though I want to eventually have my own successful business, I think it would be a good idea for me to begin as an intrapreneur. This way I am able to gain strong experience as an entrepreneur but with the support of others and being able to work with other in this industry.
As intrapreneur you are able to perform projects as an entrepreneur would but with fewer personal risks according to another business article. An intrapreneur is someone”…who uses entrepreneurial skills without incurring the risks associated with those activities” (Nimisha B). This is one of the reasons why I think I want to begin as an intrapreneur and eventually become an entrepreneur in the future. I know I will achieve my goals the more experience I gain in the world of entrepreneurship.
This semester in JRM 327 we learned so many new things about the world of social media. One of my favorite things that we did was the social media simulation. I enjoyed being a social media manager during the simulation. It was a lot of good hands on learning and I learned a lot of good advertising and marketing techniques.
During the course of this class I learned that your target audience is one of the most important things in advertising or marketing yourself or a brand. You need to know your audience in order to advertise to the right people and to use the right type of posts on the right platforms.
As everyone knows, with COVID-19 happening, everything has been a bit crazy and different. This includes the way college students have to learn. Online learning sounds like it might be easy but for many including myself, it has been a struggle. With online learning I felt it was much more difficult without having in person instructions on how to do things. I personally enjoy being in class and listening to my teachers and being able to ask questions.
Online learning was much more challenging when it first began but as the semester has progressed I found myself finding new ways to learn and ways to manage my time. I have adapted to the new learning style that we have had to do but I can’t wait to be back in the classrooms again.
This semester in class I have learned new social media strategies, ways to professionalize my social media, and stronger communication skills.
Social media can me such an awesome thing and many people enjoy it but it can also be a dark place where people literally will have their lives ripped apart. Don’t get me wrong, social media does have lots of positivity that is spread on it but there is also a lot of horribly rude and hurtful content being written as well. Social media can, to say the least, be made a much more compassionate place that is used for good rather than there being so much hate being spread around.
Public shaming, unfortunately takes place quite often on the internet and social media as it is the easiest way to spread information whether it’s true or not. In a ted talk given by Monica Lewinsky, she talks about how her life was turned upside down so quickly by information being spread so quickly because of the internet. In her speech she says, “What that meant for me personally was that overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one, worldwide.” She then added how the judgment coming from everyone was very much enabled by the internet.
People will use the social media to attack others without having to actually face them and even worse with how quickly new can spread, the cyber shaming becomes public shaming. So many people end up seeing something posted by a person that maybe they shouldn’t have posted but didn’t really think about it or even worse they post something meaning it one way but it is taken to be understood as a completely different thing.
Unfortunately this was the case for Justine Sacco. In this article it talks about how Sacco was tweeting as she was boarding a plane, some things that she thought were sarcastic and funny and knew her friends who followed her would understand. Then, next thing she knows, after landing, her tweets had blown up and people were enraged. She meant the tweets one way and they were taken another. Sacco’s life was changed for the worse after that. People were commenting horrible things about her and sending hateful messages to her and it got so crazy that she couldn’t look at her phone without it having hate towards her on it. It also ruined her career because all you had to do was google her and the negativity followed her. In the article the author says “Her tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took Sacco down, bit by bit, and so they continued to do so.” The cruel comments hardly slowed down for her because social media rewarded people for being mean and hateful towards her for what she had said so it just kept on continuing.
Things can be twist and turned so easily by people simply using social media to do it. This was also the case for Aaron Calvin who wrote an article explaining what happened to him. The social media simply got to what he said and turned him into the “bad guy” before he could even say a word. He was accused of accusing a celebrity during an interview and then his own tweets, from when he was a teenager were used against him. Calvin says in his article, “I was made into a villain and a fool, a man who tried to “cancel” Carson King and in so doing got himself ‘canceled.’” Social media can be a very powerful and evil thing when we use it for to harm someone else’s life.
Social media can be a dangerous thing when it has the power to create public shaming so easily. People can make a simple mistake or be misunderstood so easily in a blink of an eye and their whole life becomes full of negativity and hate. There isn’t a simple solution to all of this but it does start with the social media user? Maybe, next time you’re about to comment something towards someone think about what you are saying and how it could affect them.
Influencers are a huge part of social media now a days. There’s no denying it. Most likely if you have an Instagram or Twitter account you are probably following at least one influencer. Usually the type of influencers you follow either do something you are interested in or you look up to. I mean… it is in the name, they influence you most likely. The type of influencers that I follow are either makeup artists or are fashion bloggers.
I really enjoy fashion and makeup is super interesting to me as well so the influencers I follow mostly reflect what I am interested in. I follow the fashion bloggers because I look at them for inspiration. Usually they post cool new trends and sometimes cool fashion tips and hacks. I also find a lot of cool new fashion lines and clothing brands through them. I follow makeup artists because they inspire me so much with all of their talents. They are not only super interesting to me but they keep me entertained as well. I could look at makeup videos and images for hours at a time. I also am able to learn new ways of doing makeup by following the makeup artist influencers and new products that I might want get as well.
I would say influencers are based off of someone’s interest and whether you trust them or not is up to you. I’d say if an influencer post something and says a certain product is amazing that I might like, I will look more into that product and do research on it. It’s not that I don’t trust the influencer but they are just one person so your experience with something might not always be the same as someone else experience with it. Influencers are more likely to be looked at and trusted somewhat over any random person because they most likely have experience with whatever you are looking at and that’s why many people follow them. I would say I have started to follow influencers a lot more as I have gotten older from when I was younger. I think this is because social media influencers have become more and more of a popular thing.
I believe that influencers are effective on social media because they have a huge following most likely. This means that many people follow them for a reason and they have something that people like or want to see more of. Brands look to advertise their products though influencers because they know that many people will see what they post and it most likely will draw that specific crowd in that is following them. For example, most likely a beauty company that wants to sell a product of some sort will reach out to specifically a beauty social media influencer because they know the certain crowd that is following that influencer is more likely to buy the product.
Becoming an influencer has become an actual job for many people in today’s world and the industry continues to grow. Many people love following them from various things including myself. There are social media influencers for so many things. You can follow them for a review of a product, for entertainment purposes, tutorials, and so much more.
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