Today is the day before my third week of the new semester begins. I have attended both of the STEAM classes so far, and one mid-week meeting with the rest of my group. As an art student going into this class, I’ll admit, I’m rather intimidated by the syllabus and class structure. The first class seemed to be filled with concepts I was not familiar with, but was somewhat expected to be. I was really thankful that one of my team members knew what to do for the first assignment, since I didn’t know how to make a group contract and he had already done that kind of thing before. He actually seems to know a lot more about what’s going on than me and some of my classmates do, so we ended up relying on him a lot. We all definitely try to be careful not to rely on him too much though, and make sure we’re pulling our own weight.
It’s already been a really interesting experience having a group with people from such different backgrounds. One one hand, me and one of my team members are friends from the same program. We have done group projects before, and know that we work well together. Having engineering students brings to the table entirely different ways of thinking. For example, during our meeting we were trying to think of what we wanted the overall emotional take-away of our project to be, and one classmate said that as an engineer, he simply wanted something that would look cool. I think that that might be one of the biggest challenges our group is facing right now, where a few of us are used to dealing with emotional works and want our project to be impactful and deep, while the other few are more interested in making an interesting visual concept and creation. It also doesn’t help much that we just had a new member added to our group, and we haven’t been able to have a full group discussion since to understand his ideas.
That might be our other big challenge: communication. As of now we still don’t have one space where we can all message each other. We managed to get all but one member into a group chat, but now some people need to make accounts on something else so we can all talk to each other. But even in this group chat, a lot of the time people will leave and not reply for extremely long intervals. As I type this, I have been waiting for one group member to reply to a message for 3 days. It’s a bit concerning, but I think we can always find a way to make do if some people fall short. At the end of the day, I think that once we figure out what kind of work we want to make and get everyone in one messenger, one of the more difficult parts of the assignment will be done, and we can focus on creating!
On a side note, I had a really cool moment during our mid-week group meeting when we were brainstorming project ideas. As the two engineering students were talking about some ideas and aspects of a project they’d be interested in, some of the things they said really impacted me. I kind of had a realization that they weren’t necessarily just engineers. They were both people who had experience in the artistic world, and had really interesting things to say about it. I’d also say that me and my friend are more into things that some our more traditional “artistic” classmates aren’t (like math). That revelation really inspired me, and is making me appreciate the dynamic we have in our group even more.
Throughout the short time that I’ve been in this class, I have found myself drawing a lot of similarities between this course and the Lively Objects and Spaces (Interactive Media Arts) class I took last semester. They both are interested in discovering ways that art and technology can be combined to make interesting and impactful experiences. It also involved a small group project, and a larger (but optional) group project. The STEAM class is different from that class though, in that we are required to find clients, and go about this project in more of a business-like manner. It definitely feels more professional than the project I did last semester. I’m hoping by the end of the class, that I will have pushed myself out of my comfort zone and have become more experienced in the professional business/artistic world.
As far as skills go for this project, I’m not too sure how much I will be able to contribute, as we have not yet decided what we want our project to be like. I do think that I’m pretty good at figuring out how to do new things, and learning interesting and creative ways to use a little amount of knowledge of technology to do a lot of things. I guess I’ll also be good at designing and creating the project’s visuals.
One of the things I will for sure need to work on is my assertiveness. It’s not that I don’t know how to lead and act with authority, but I find that I’m generally a really laid back person, so I won’t have strong opinions about a lot of things. When I do, it’s hard for me to say that I want to do a specific thing, or that I don’t want to do a specific thing, without beating around the bush. Another thing I sort of struggle with is assigning work to others. In group projects I always like to take on as much work as possible, since I can trust myself to get it done, and because I don’t want to feel like the person that relies too much on other people. I really don’t like feeling like I’m relying on other people. I’d much rather do most of the work myself. For this project, I’m at a disadvantage in terms of skills and experience, so I think for myself, I’ll need to get used to trusting others to get work done, and not feeling bad when people put in a lot of work.
As of now, we don’t know what we want to do our project on. The team was originally formed because I saw three other people who had their second choice as a “Music” project. With our last two additions, I’m not sure how much our team still wants to stick to that idea. We seem to be leaning more towards an art installation, but I think sound is still going to play an important role in the final product. We’re going to meet up again on Wednesday, and I think we’re going to decide for sure what we want to do. Some of my teammates mentioned making a subwoofer, and I think that would be really cool.
I’m really excited to be in this class, and I’m looking forward to working on this project with my team!
– Aishah V.
A Journey Through STEAM 