For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been feeling overwhelmed about the next stages of my project around campaigning. Throughout the past few months during independent study time, I dug deep into research regarding student immigration, independent working, education, and more while contacting experts on the subject. Although the email response rate from experts wasn’t as high as I had hoped, the responses I did receive were extremely helpful and guided me to a better path.
Anyways, back to the past couple of weeks – I was feeling a bit of momentum around my work until I sent more emails with no response and stalled on designing graphics for my project as I couldn’t find where to even continue. Do I keep sharing the data I’ve been sharing? Do I rebrand my campaign? Do I switch gears and share different content? Am I even reaching the right audience? Is it wise to invest time in these when a giant goal is ahead of me? I was, as I mentioned, overwhelmed and falling into a mental block.
The tutorial with David came at just the right time, however. I really took all of his feedback in, and one of the recommendations that stood out to me the most was to narrow it down! I realized that although I still have as an ultimate goal to lobby the government, to think that I can get that accomplished in 70 days is too ambitious and I was spreading myself way too thin, hence the overwhelmed feeling.
David also recommended I reflect on where I see myself in terms of my project. I had previously presented to other tutors that at the very beginning of my project I saw myself as someone trying to facilitate international students putting their creative work out there, but now I see myself as someone running a lobbying campaign. To add to that reflection, David asked to visualize myself in regards to my project way beyond the length of the course and in terms of analysis and evaluation.
Starting with where I see myself in the future, my first honest thought is that I see myself with a job as I’ve spent all my savings in this MA, so I must work somewhere that generates an income, but I’ll surely use all the skills I’ve gained throughout this MA in any future jobs. I’ll also be carrying out my campaigns pass the course, as I’m committed to reaching my goal of allowing self-employment for international students.
When it comes to analysis and evaluation, it was described during the feedback session that analysis refers to breaking down data and evaluation is giving value to the broken down elements. My sense is that I’ve been deep-diving into the analysis of the data I’ve found for my project since I want to have all the knowledge possible to convince a policymaker to change the law regarding self-employment for international students. I’ve filtered all the data I’ve gathered to what would favor my campaign’s position, which I consider to be the evaluation part. With every news story, article, and statistic I’ve found, I ask myself: how would this data point prove and favor my purpose? I will continue expanding my analysis and evaluation as I read more articles, such as the Future of Cultural Value by the University of Warwick (which David recommended), and as I contact more experts.
With the research and feedback, I’ve gathered, my next steps are reframing my question, narrow down my 10-week goal, and contact experts that could be helpful aids in my project. I will soon update in a future blog post what these consist of.
(Ironic personal sidenote: in the last couple of weeks I also had to turn down a job opportunity due to student route visa restrictions. Hence the urgency for my project.)