Well here I am at the end of my first year on the course and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. It’s not been easy by any means, but I feel extremely proud that I’m still here and haven’t imploded altogether with the pressure.
If you’ve read my blogs you’ll know that I was struggling away on benefits before I started the course, due to illness. I tried to move back into work, selling websites, but had no training and had serious problems with virtually every site I sold.
I then started learning about search engine optimization (SEO) and Internet marketing, but realised I needed to learn much more about websites and the Internet. That’s when I found the course. It seemed just what I was looking for, obviously web design, but also design for many other types of media too. And even small units on marketing, branding and SEO, so I made the call.
When I first started I was very nervous, both with my anxiety, and of course I was completely new to all the software and skills I would be learning, not to mention a long time out of education. Once or twice through this first year I’ll admit I was a little overwhelmed and often felt like I was falling behind with my studies, only to find a few other students felt just the same.
However, I found I picked things up pretty quickly and in the first couple of months we had lots of helpful lectures on typography, design skills. And on our reflective learning skills for our personal and professional development using Kolb’s, Gibbs and John’s reflective learning systems. We were also introduced to Honey and Mumford, showing us what type of learner we are, and where we need to improve. In the first couple of months I think we really had our hands held, maybe to ease us into the course.
After Christmas though was whole different ball game. We had done several designs using InDesgn and even designed our first website. Now came the time to code the site to go on the web. Learning coding languages, the one thing that really frightened me. It wasn’t easy, I really had to concentrate and I’m still struggling, but I enjoyed it and was quite excited at the prospect of actually seeing my design up on the Internet.
At the same time we started learning PhotoShop, perhaps I should have been frightened of this more! It’s a massive program, I’m really only just starting to use some of it’s functions. To add to the pressure we were moving towards more self learning, we had two difficult units running at the same time, and were given all our digital imaging unit in one go, to finish for one big deadline instead of lots of smaller ones. I was beginning to struggle at this point.
I found myself starting to suffer with odd little illnesses. Maybe it was down to my stress or maybe a weak immune system because of all the all night working sessions to meet deadlines. Either way I got through it and feel stronger for it.
Looking at my work it’s obvious to see that my design skills have and are improving a great deal, which is the point of the course. With a greater understanding and knowledge of the software I’m certain my designs will continue to improve once I know I have the capabilities to design and program what I want.
My use of the software, especially PhotoShop is becoming much more fluent, but still needs much more studying on my part, and as I said this will enable me to widen my scope of what I can design.
An area that really does require my attention is cascading Style Systems (CSS)2.1. I am still struggling with CSS and need to do lots of work on it. The obvious way is to design more websites.
A regret I do have from the first year is that I feel I could have applied myself much better to the work. I can use the excuse that I have a very stressful life at the moment, which I do. But so do others on the course, and I feel if I could manage my time better I could get much more out of the course, and a better mark at the end.
To improve on my first years performance I aim to build at least 2 or 3 websites over the summer to improve my CSS coding skills and I will start to learn PHP language. Perhaps just the basics, I would be happy if I could program a contact form by the end of summer. I feel this would allow me to go back to the course starting ahead of the game, instead of behind how I’ve felt many times this year.
For next year I need to plan my time much better. I’m hoping to be working part time by then which I feel will benefit me with less stress because of a lack of money, and because I will have less time I’ll have no option but to plan it better. I do have a tendency to produce better work when I’m under pressure, but if I could even do my basic designs and any research in good time this would cut down on my stress levels massively.
And finally, by doing this I will be able to make much more use of my classmates and former students to get feedback on my work. We have the forum and Google wave where my classmates, the second year students and even former students are happy to give their comments and suggestions. I must make better use of this, and of course give feedback to the new first years students.
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