The Final Week

That’s it!

Everything is handed in; essays, assignments, and online exams. This blog is my last thing to submit.

Even though I’ve submitted the final link for my website I’ve been tinkering away at it since. I separated our contact email and our social media onto different pages because I wanted to be able to imbed our Instagram feed onto the page, which I did by creating a widget using a site called Snapwidget. After showing the website to my swap shop partner, she was very happy with it and we’ve decided once we can get our domain name sorted out, we’ll definitely be using it as our proper site!

Today was the due date of my History essay, my last History essay as I don’t plan on continuing with the subject into second year. I’ll be sticking with Politics, as I feel it’ll work a lot better with my Journalism degree. I’ve really enjoyed the year of History, but I do feel it’s something I could easily study in my spare time if I really wanted to.

With everything either submitted today or already, today is my last day of first year. It’s been a weird one, especially with the lockdown, but I finish up the first year of my degree super confident of the fact I made a really good decision in starting this course at last.

Roll on next semester!

Week… I Actually Couldn’t Tell You (Too Many Weeks Into Lockdown)

Right.

So I think it’s Week 12? Or what would have been Week 12 if college was open and all was right with the world? I don’t know. Feeling a little like Tom Hanks in Cast Away these days, although at least I have housemates and haven’t had to resort to fashioning my own Wilson-like companion. Yet.

if lockdown is extended past May 5th this is what my house will look and sound like

My major difficulty in all this is the lack of structure to my day to do work in. Having the external structure of leaving the house and going to college was a big help to me in getting my work done. Getting extensions on everything has definitely helped, as I’ve been working well by doing little bits of everything each day.

One major awkward part about working from home is that my house is on a main road, with a surprising amount of traffic considering we’re supposed to be on lockdown! I have links to record as part of my radio assignment, and I’ve had to do all my recording after midnight because my microphone keeps picking up traffic noises. Good thing my sleep pattern was already completely destroyed and I don’t go to bed ’til 3am most nights….

Between the extensions, exam dates and what work I already have done, I’ll be finished everything this semester on April 30th. It’s been an odd one for sure!

Roll on Final Week!

Easter Week (Week 4 of Lockdown)

It should be pretty obvious, dear reader, that this week has been my most productive since Lockdown started. How is it obvious you ask? I’m posting this blog on a Friday, not last minute of a Sunday night.

Yes I managed to resurrect my motivation this week and actually put some work into my assignments. I chose to focus this week on my website design project for the other half of my marks for this module (Technical Writing). We had to design a website for a company, fictional or real. My website is actually for my own business that I’ve been running since last April with a friend, Swap Shop Limerick.

It’s a swap shop event that we run on a monthly basis in the Record Room on Catherine Street in Limerick, and we were doing pretty well for ourselves til we’ve had to cancel all our events since March *shakes fist in general direction of Corona Virus*.

I had been discussing the idea of setting us up a website with my partner Aimee briefly when we first started but we figured we’d stick with Instagram and Facebook for now (go check us out!). Given that I was setting up a website anyway for an assignment, it just makes sense I’d do it for my own little business.

I decided to go with using the new Google Sites builder, which I found very easy to use. I actually had to start over from scratch about halfway through as I realised I’d been setting it up logged in via my personal email, rather than our email for the swap shop. I wanted to set up a simple, but attractive looking site that we could use for promoting our events, posting photos and also publish blogs on. The theme I used is ‘Aristotle’, and it had colours already available that actually matched our logo really well without having to change them too much. My plan is to look into obtaining a proper domain name for us as well, maybe swapshoplimerick.ie if I can get it.

Next week I have an in-class assessment (does it still count as ‘in-class’ if we’re working from home?) for my Sub Editing/Indesign module, so I plan on focusing on that and my final History essay for that week. The week after that I’ll have my Radio Journalism project due and a Public Administration exam so I’ll be focusing on them for Week 12.

And of course I’ll be working on my final two blogs posts. It’s crazy to think how close we are to the end now.

Roll on Week 11!

Week 10 (Week 3 of Lockdown/Losing My Mind)

So I will be straight up: my mental health is taking a beating during Lockdown. Today was the first day since this started that I was actually able to read the news and look at articles on Covid-19. I was doing pretty good with keeping up with assignments and my online lectures until about halfway through Week 9. Then my brain pulled a Mr Rochester: it locked my motivation in the attic and decided it would be a lot happier with comfort reading and bed and decided to court those instead.

my motivation is like the mad first wife in the attic for the last week and a half, can you tell I’ve been re-reading a lot of classical literature?

Easter week is next week, and I’ve decided that rather than take it as my ‘week off’ as I would have if this were a normal semester and the world were not on lockdown, I can use it to make up the time from Week 9 I spent binging Jane Austen adaptations (ma’am that’s my emotional support literary hero please).

I’ve come up with a new idea for my website for Technical Writing, the other 50% of this module. For now I’ll keep going with creating it on Google Sites, but I may have a play around with the site builder on WordPress, as a few of my classmates are using it and like it a lot, but we’ll see.

For the rest of my modules, I’ve got readings to catch up on for Public Admin and History, an assessment for Sub Editing/Indesign the week after Easter, and my radio documentary. I had emailed one of my interviewees to see about conducting our interview through WhatsApp voice messages instead of in person due to the Covid-19 restrictions, but unfortunately he’s not answering my emails. I’m a little disappointed because I was really looking forward to that interview and producing my radio piece on my chosen topic, about Give Us the Night and their campaign to get licencing laws in Ireland changed. However our lecturer has given us alternative audio to edit down into a piece so at least I can make use of that if I don’t hear back from my interviewee at all.

I’ll be posting during Easter week now, seeing as I missed last week. That’s if I survive the egg hunt my housemates and I are planning around the house, which already is shaping up to be fiercely competitive! Roll on Easter Week!