After a very busy and eventful four months, my time as a CUPID Associate has come to an end. In my final post, I’m going to reflect on my work and experiences as an associate.
One of my favorite parts of being an associate was working with my fellow associates, Rachel and Alexa. I had worked with both of them before and was familiar with their skills and writing styles. From day one, we established our vision of how CUPID should run and created a week-by-week plan for the blog and workshops. We created themed weeks, which helped us organize when we held workshops, posted individual guest posts, and who would take charge of the blog every week. For any future associates, I cannot stress enough how well this worked. Our plan nixed any blog management stress, and we were able to be efficient and focus on other tasks.
The project that took up most of my focus was the CSS In Digication project, which consisted of a workshop and a video tutorial series. As a PWR student, I had created three Digication portfolios, and my background in coded languages (I know Java, C++, HTML, and CSS) had already led me to figure out how to modify Digication colors and border lines. Yet, at the request of RPR, I sat back down with the code and searched other Universities’ Digication webguides, such as Stony Brook and St. John’s, in order to learn some other ways to modify the portfolios. From the collection of this knowledge, I created a PowerPoint with Alexa and Rachel that outlined steps for modifying different portions of the Digication CSS. The workshop had four attendees and – while it was not as successful as our 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Microsoft Word workshop which had eight attendees – we were able to work closely with our attendees to teach them a variety of CSS design techniques that would help them personalize their Digication portfolios.
However, after our workshop when Alexa and I began discussing turning the workshop into a video tutorial series, I found myself unsatisfied with simply creating tutorials based off the information that was already out there on other University guides. One of the great things about CUPID is its dedication to creating great products for its clients and providing educational support for PWR students; I wanted to live up to this standard and I challenged myself to find new ways to personalize the Digication portfolio. After several weeks of playing with code and reading through the CSS reference guide, I was able to discover and create video content for six original topics: Adding Shadow to the Left Navigation Module, Adjusting the Section Title, Adding a Border Line Between the Left Navigation and Main Container, Centering the Gallery Module, Changing Cursors, and Making Left Navigation Button Links. In total, I worked collaboratively with Alexa to film and edit nineteen CSS In Digication tutorial videos. We even established a summer release schedule for the video series, so a new video tutorial (and sometimes two) will be available to PWR students every week of summer! Completing the CSS In Digication project was very exciting for me and I am proud to know that our videos will be useful to all of the incoming PWR seniors who will be completing their portfolios in September.
My time as a CUPID Associate taught me how to efficiently practice division of labor and integrated teams. While Alexa, Rachel, and I worked closely together during the creation of the Word Workshop, most of our projects consisted of a mix of independent work and receiving peer feedback. This allowed each of us to work on projects that fit our skill sets and matched the types of documents we needed for our individual portfolios. Our independent work also challenged me to think about our organizational voice as I created documents so that the CUPID ethos was maintained throughout our documents and workshops. Despite our divide-and-conquer method, we did make a point to keep in contact and met at least once a week to update each other and get feedback on what we were working on. This is another thing I’d recommend to all future associates; keeping in contact with your partner associates just makes life easier!
I am very grateful for my time as a CUPID Associate. I was able to work with wonderful people on some very exciting projects, and, ultimately, I believe we’ve founded some great organizational techniques for the program. I would recommend this experience to all PWR majors, and I am so excited to see what the next group of associates are able to do for the CUPID program.