Honors Experiences | Learningportfolio

Experience 1 - Sumac + Sage Web Development

During this self-designed experience, I developed a website for my mom’s business, in which she provides vegan cooking instruction experiences. I recognized that her business was growing, and she needed a place to advertise her services, so I designed and built a website using HTML and CSS. Some of my goals for this project were to:

Challenge my creativity to design a website that is not only functional, but also engaging to look at and scroll through.
Go beyond my current understanding of HTML/CSS when developing this website.

With this project, I wanted to grow my web development skills as well as have a personal project to put on my resume. As an information technology major, having proof of personal projects is important when job searching. I learned a lot about project management during this experience. I had never directly interfaced with a client prior to this experience, so it was interesting to learn just how much you may need to rely on clients during a process. I expanded my ability to be self-driven; this project was run solely by myself, so I had to keep myself on track. I believe that I completed my goals. I was able to think creatively for an engaging user experience, and I learned new skills within the web development field.

You can access the website at sagebushstone.github.io/home (content still in progress), and you can view my ongoing journal by clicking here.

Experience 2 - Exploring Leadership Honors Seminar

During this Honors seminar, I learned about different leadership theories. I also had the opportunity to apply them in the real world with the service learning project. During this project, I and my team of four worked to put on the annual IT Intern Summit, a conference for college and high school interns in the Cincinnati region.

I was able to learn a lot about leadership and the execution of a project from start to finish through this service learning project. Because I was the person who connected the team with the nonprofit affiliated with the Summit, I naturally took on a leadership role. Overall, the Summit went extremely well, a testament to the work that we put in.

I also participated in group discussions and observed leadership in action during this course, giving me an understanding of other perspectives of leadership and how I might apply it to my own life.

Leadership is critical for Global Citizen Scholars; being able to interact with peers and followers in a way that is transformational, rather than transactional, can be highly influential. Below, you can see a picture of the project management team at the site for the Intern Summit as a representation of our accomplishments.

Experience 3 - Novel Writing

For this self-designed honors experience, I planned to write 30,000 words of a novel/novella. Along the way, I wanted to reflect on character motivations and improve with time management as it pertains to writing. During my experience, I shifted my goals to focus more on “how can each writing project I pursue help me grow as a writer with the ultimate goal of finishing the novella?” 30,000 words is a lot for one project, so I ultimately wrote 6,000 words and have a finished plan of what needs to happen for this story to have a satisfying resolution. I also wrote an 8,000 word story; in the process of this, I learned about character motivation and used it as a proof of concept for the novella. Finally, I wrote a 1,700 word story, a parody of a radio show, as a Christmas present for my mom (see below for the audio recording of myself telling it). I learned about how to manage my time to finish a project under a deadline, and how to write in a different voice than I am accustomed to.

In all of these projects, I reflected on how each made me grow as a writer, and I believe that I learned something new from each of these which I can use to finish my novella. Overall, I have grown as a student and as a Global Citizen Scholar through these writings.

Click the following link to view the audio recording of the parody audio recording (this is the most audience-ready work that I completed in the past few months): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHAAa3W9JFs