Author: Drew

The moment I chose to recreate is a scene from The Hangover. This movie is one of my favorites, so as soon as we were given the assignment, several scenes immediately came to mind that I thought I could realistically recreate. I rewatched the movie and looked around my room to find props that might work. While watching, I came across this specific scene and realized I could recreate it using the stuffed animal duck I have in my room. The final result actually turned out much better than I expected. The hardest part was lining up the angle correctly, since the phone needed to be perfectly level with the ground. My roommate, Ibi, also had to lie down in order to capture the scene as accurately as possible. Overall, I really enjoyed this assignment. It was fun working on it with Ibi, and it was a nice break from the more challenging assignments and studying I have had recently.

The Halfa Kucha was an assignment unlike any I had done before. Typically, when I am asked to create a presentation, I am expected to include a large amount of information on each slide. That was not the case with the Halfa Kucha, where the focus was primarily on visuals, and the presenter elaborated on the images rather than relying on text. For this assignment, I chose to use a combination of direct images from the two comics I selected, Kindred and Stitches, along with photos that were not taken directly from the excerpts. For example, slide five uses an image that I felt conveyed far more of a story and emotion than the images pulled straight from the comics themselves. From my actual presentation, I learned that this format required a drastically different approach than the ones I had used previously. Without words on the screen, I had to rely almost entirely on what I said to communicate the important points of my presentation. As an audience member, I also noticed that I had to listen much more carefully to fully understand what the presenter was trying to communicate. I cannot say that I preferred this style of presenting compared to the ways I have presented in the past. As a listener, it was more difficult to fully grasp the presenter’s points, and as a presenter, it was more challenging to effectively convey my own points. Overall, this experience showed me how much structure and on-screen guidance I usually rely on in presentations. While the Halfa Kucha challenged me to be more intentional with my speaking and storytelling, it also reinforced that I am more comfortable and effective in presentation styles that balance strong visuals with clear written support. Presenting has always been a challenge for me throughout my academic career, and I really wanted to do well on this assignment. I spent a significant amount of time designing my slides, aiming to make them visually engaging so the audience would remain interested throughout my three minutes and twenty seconds. I also practiced for an entire week to master the timing of twenty seconds per slide. However, when it came time to present, I froze up, which has happened to me frequently. I am not sure if it is a confidence issue or simply the pressure of standing in front of a crowd, but it consistently affects me. Despite this, I see presenting as a skill I will continue to develop during my time at Emory. My goal is to graduate with the confidence to stand in front of an audience and convey my work clearly and effectively. I am grateful for the opportunity to present this year because it gave me another chance to practice and learn, even if it did not go exactly as I had hoped. This experience was a valuable learning opportunity, and I am glad I got the chance to explore a different style of presenting, which encouraged me to grow as both a speaker and a storyteller.

Album Cover:

My mixtape is inspired by the semifinal loss my team suffered this past weekend. I wanted to create a playlist that captured the flood of emotions that hit the moment we were scored on in overtime. In sudden death, one goal decides everything, and when the other team put the ball in the net, I watched my teammates drop to their knees in agony. Seeing that broke me. Their dreams and college careers ended in an instant, and the realization that I would never share the field with them again was what hurt the most. I made this mixtape as a way to cope with that wave of sadness. It helped me work through the acceptance stage of grief and begin to move forward with my life. My album cover is inspired by the iconic missed penalty in a World Cup final, often remembered through the image of a player standing alone in a moment of absolute heartbreak. People sometimes refer to it as “the man who died standing,” because the image captures someone who looks shattered but refuses to collapse. That posture, that silence, and that weight all mirror the emotions I felt when we lost our semifinal. In that moment, I felt the same mix of shock, emptiness, and disbelief. Just like the player in the photo, I stood there trying to process the sudden end of something I cared deeply about. My album cover represents that feeling: the stillness after everything falls apart, and the struggle to accept what just happened.

After turning in the first part of my literacy narrative, I liked the idea I had written about, but I felt like something was missing. Before writing, I knew there was something significant about this trip to my grandparents’, but I didn’t really know what it was. Through this process, I learned a lot about myself from my writing processes to my personal feelings. The comic was important in this writing process because it allowed me to take time to consolidate my thoughts and really focus on what was important. That ended up being the overall theme of freedom to choose. The comic was also important because it allowed me to take a step back and think about what I wanted to get out of the moment, and it wasn’t until I took that time to reflect that I was able to truly understand what it meant to me. After completing the third part of my narrative, the story is much clearer. At first, I just had an idea, and even though the moment felt impactful, I didn’t really know why. I now feel that I have a good understanding of what this moment meant to me, and that’s because I was able to take time to digest what this trip truly represented.

I have found that juggling academics, athletics, and my social life has been quite difficult the past couple of months. I often feel great during during class and practice, but then don’t have enough energy to do anything after. Or vice-versa, I have enough energy for class and for social activities, but I am tired at practice. When given the opportunity to track something in my life I thought that this was a perfect opportunity to see how my energy levels are throughout the day and how I might be able to improve them. I started doing this by first looking up a couple of things that could impact energy levels throughout the day and I found hours slept incorporated with the quality of those hours, Hours exercised, bottles of water drank per day, and the amount of drinks including electrolytes drank per day directly affect energy levels throughout the day. Over the past week tracked these metrics to see if they affected my energy levels positively or negatively. Originally I found from this experiment that the best combination for maximum energy was having between 7-9 hours of quality sleep, around 2 hours exercised total and an increasingly amount of water and drinks with electrolytes drank. What I did not account for ,however, was getting sick near the backend of my study. This heavily skewed my data making it hard to tell what was the best combination for maximum energy. I am planning on starting the same study over the next 2 weeks to see how the data changes with me being healthy.

Creating my comic was a three-week process that consisted of many different stages. I first had my literacy narrative. How was I going to get all of this writing into my comic? I had to figure out what needed to be in my comic and what was fluff. This process took me a couple of days and was one of the more difficult parts. This was the part that would make or break my comic. After figuring out what to use in my comic, I had to decide my layout and style of my comic. I decided to go with a simple six-panel comic per page with one large panel taking up an entire page. Doing this would allow me to easily organize my thoughts and break down my comic into different parts. The most important page of my comic is my page that consists of one panel. I decided to make this page that way because it is the most important page and is where I developed a deeper appreciation for reading. By putting this one panel on its separate page, it makes the reader take notice of it. It gives the reader a chance to see something different and gives them time to analyze what I am really trying to convey. After deciding the layout of my comic, I actually had to make it. This was the hardest part, but also the one I found most enjoyable. I was able to be creative with my comic and learn some along the way too. As my comic progressed, my drawings became more sophisticated and, in my opinion, better. I was able to experiment with some of my ideas and create a comic that I am personally proud of. The creation process took me about two weeks, but in the end, the result was unlike anything I thought it would be when I started. After creating my comic, I came up with a title and was finished with my work. To talk more on my page with one panel, I really wanted to illustrate myself encaptured in the book almost as if I was surrounded by the things I was reading. This was fairly difficult for me, however, and would have been much better if I could have hired an illustrator. Doing this process on my own with no preparation or experience, however, gave me the opportunity to learn, fail, and then later succeed. Overall, I found this assignment to be very helpful in terms of my graphic design and my literacy abilities. I was able to pull out the most important parts of my narrative and reduce the fluff that was unneeded. This is a process that I should take with every piece of writing I do. It also improved my ability to draw and express creativity through my writing. It was a lot of trial and error, but as I progressed through my comic, I could see physical evidence of my improvement, and it gave me the confidence I needed to complete my comic. This assignment was pretty difficult for me, but one I am grateful for.

• The Tracing process that I endured before beginning my essay was quite a long process for me. I used this part of the assignment as a moment to plan for the actual essay. I brainstormed for a couple of days on what pages I wanted to trace and how they would relate to each other and the little differences that they would have. I then went through the process of annotating. This part of the planning is where I gathered my thoughts on the two pages and began to understand the pages and plan for my essay.  

• Writing in the ABT format was very different than what I grew up doing and was something that I felt took some getting used to. In my original draft that I made before starting my finished essay, I found myself often slipping back into old habits. I really tried to stay focused on the ABT structure and as I began to write more, I felt that writing in this format became a little clearer to me.  

• This assignment where we took a deeper look into these two comics allowed me to analyze a piece of writing unlike what I’ve ever done before. While reading through, I looked for little details that stood out to me as something that the author was trying to convey. I noticed the acts of realism that David small used to convey important scenes and Tillie Walden’s use of exploding color to illustrate emotions that she was feeling.  

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