Reflective Essay
Throughout my high school career, 12th grade year is perhaps the most challenging. There are quite a lot of things to stress about besides normal class work, things like online portfolio and college applications. However, I feel like when I’m finish with all that work, I feel that it will be all worth it and the work that has been done always has a lesson learned. Being in the ESET academy over the years gave me a sense of how important the school really means to me. There were things that I didn’t know about such as how our daily lives affect the environment and during the time I was in AP Environmental helped me understand more of what it means to be an ESET student. In the class, most of the activities that we do were involved in group work and collaborating with my classmates, however one group project stood out the most for me.
It all began in mid May of junior year, when our final exam was assigned to be a parody music video that had to be environmental related. The teacher gave each group a certain chapter to cover in their musical, ours turn out to be Mining and how it affects the environment. My group, Angel Allungua, E Mannuel Loud, and myself included. Our first important thing to do was to discuss on what songs to choose in our musical, Mannuel suggested a rap song but I wasn’t good keeping the pace in rap music, and Angel came up with some other songs use in the video. The outcome was that we had our own music to sing and rewrote the original lyrics to something mining related and came up at least with a basic storyboard to give the video a bit of plot into it. When we had finalized our ideas and plans, the major problem was filming. Not everyone in the group was available in the free time we had during the time we made this video. Angel had band practice and rehearsals while Mannuel had a part time job after school and I was busy packing my stuff during my moving process after school. We basically had to take everyone’s schedule and planned out in which days we weren’t available and which days to film and what scenes to do. We used the opportunity to use the microphone that our teacher provided us to do our voice recording in the song, but time was limited since the microphone was actually rented and many other groups were also using it in class. At this point, we felt that we weren’t going to have enough chances to use the microphone, so we had no choice to record our voice overs to our phones, microphones in our laptops or computers, etc. All that was left was to include the audio and had Angel to video edit the scenes and put it into one video. Since there wasn’t much time until the due date, we had little time for all of us to review the video and what to fix and revise. The outcome turned out to be a 9 minute cringe video containing 3 songs in it. While the editing was poorly done, and audio had a ton of background noise during the singing, I liked how the final product turned out to be and gave me a valuable experience in this group project.
You might be wondering, how is this related to ESET and how is this is going to allow me to be ready in the future? First, to me this project was a big review to AP Environmental, not just my group’s video but the other groups as well, Each group gave an informative but brief video that made me look back to what I learned in this class. This class made me change how I viewed the environment and as well as being an ESET student. Second, I feel like in the future, I will be more involved in group collaborative work in college and the career I set my path to. This group project actually gave me an early experience and what that may be like in the future such as being responsible on the role you have, discuss ideas with your group, plan out everything with your group, and talk out problems that your group may disagree with. Overall, this is the reason allow me to be ready in future challenges that I will face in society.
Throughout my high school career, 12th grade year is perhaps the most challenging. There are quite a lot of things to stress about besides normal class work, things like online portfolio and college applications. However, I feel like when I’m finish with all that work, I feel that it will be all worth it and the work that has been done always has a lesson learned. Being in the ESET academy over the years gave me a sense of how important the school really means to me. There were things that I didn’t know about such as how our daily lives affect the environment and during the time I was in AP Environmental helped me understand more of what it means to be an ESET student. In the class, most of the activities that we do were involved in group work and collaborating with my classmates, however one group project stood out the most for me.
It all began in mid May of junior year, when our final exam was assigned to be a parody music video that had to be environmental related. The teacher gave each group a certain chapter to cover in their musical, ours turn out to be Mining and how it affects the environment. My group, Angel Allungua, E Mannuel Loud, and myself included. Our first important thing to do was to discuss on what songs to choose in our musical, Mannuel suggested a rap song but I wasn’t good keeping the pace in rap music, and Angel came up with some other songs use in the video. The outcome was that we had our own music to sing and rewrote the original lyrics to something mining related and came up at least with a basic storyboard to give the video a bit of plot into it. When we had finalized our ideas and plans, the major problem was filming. Not everyone in the group was available in the free time we had during the time we made this video. Angel had band practice and rehearsals while Mannuel had a part time job after school and I was busy packing my stuff during my moving process after school. We basically had to take everyone’s schedule and planned out in which days we weren’t available and which days to film and what scenes to do. We used the opportunity to use the microphone that our teacher provided us to do our voice recording in the song, but time was limited since the microphone was actually rented and many other groups were also using it in class. At this point, we felt that we weren’t going to have enough chances to use the microphone, so we had no choice to record our voice overs to our phones, microphones in our laptops or computers, etc. All that was left was to include the audio and had Angel to video edit the scenes and put it into one video. Since there wasn’t much time until the due date, we had little time for all of us to review the video and what to fix and revise. The outcome turned out to be a 9 minute cringe video containing 3 songs in it. While the editing was poorly done, and audio had a ton of background noise during the singing, I liked how the final product turned out to be and gave me a valuable experience in this group project.
You might be wondering, how is this related to ESET and how is this is going to allow me to be ready in the future? First, to me this project was a big review to AP Environmental, not just my group’s video but the other groups as well, Each group gave an informative but brief video that made me look back to what I learned in this class. This class made me change how I viewed the environment and as well as being an ESET student. Second, I feel like in the future, I will be more involved in group collaborative work in college and the career I set my path to. This group project actually gave me an early experience and what that may be like in the future such as being responsible on the role you have, discuss ideas with your group, plan out everything with your group, and talk out problems that your group may disagree with. Overall, this is the reason allow me to be ready in future challenges that I will face in society.