Saturday, November 5, 2011

Anxiety Balls

Oh, school. Why do you have to be so amazing and so intimidating at the same time?

So far, it's been so good. I've completed our weekly assignments on time and with good feedback, I've gotten A's and B's on all my quizzes, and I've felt pretty confident about the material and my grasp of it.

But now, there's a bigger assignment. It's worth more points and requires more time and effort, not to mention some creative thinking. And I'm stumped and flailing. The assignment is to create a project that explains an aspect of media. I could make a short video or powerpoint presentation, or write an article and submit it for publication, I could take a survey of people and present some findings... I have no idea what to do. I had to pick a topic by the 31st, so I went with Feminism in Media because it's something I've been fairly obsessed with lately and it's a nice, broad topic, so I'd have plenty of room to find my niche.

But I'm having trouble focusing. I thought about making a video that touches on the stereotypes of women and minorities in the media, but I have no experience with any video editing software of the last 15 years, and am worried about the learning curve. Besides, where do I begin? Television? Movies? Advertising? I've chosen too broad a topic, maybe.

I've been feeling like I'm only keeping up by the skin of my teeth, and have only been doing so well by luck, even though as I write it, I know it's not true. I've made my schoolwork a priority and have pushed through and have worked hard and I can continue to do well if I just keep moving. This insecurity is coming from the larger scope of this new project, plus the research paper that was just introduced yesterday (so I've a whole new ball of anxieties to play with until the final week), and I've recently had a few inconvenient migraine days that left me less than my intellectual best for a week or so.

I'm starting to feel a little pressure.

I wish we hadn't made this major move in my first millisecond back at school. I wish migraines didn't make it so hard to think. I wish I could get a handle on this project. I've got two and a half weeks to pull it out.


2 comments:

Jessica said...

Take a deep breath...you can do this!!! =)

I like the idea of focusing on advertising!

Heather said...

Don't worry, I'm right there with you. I'm barely finishing my projects on time and last week I had two big migraine days that put me even more behind. Your project sounds tough because it's so open-ended, but at least you have a topic picked out. That's one of the hardest parts! I don't know if you use a mac or pc, but I have iMovie on my mac and hadn't even opened it until this semester for my multimedia class, and it was actually pretty easy to learn...I just had to use the Help feature and google a few things.

You'll do fine, don't worry! Have fun with it!