The New Media Certificate journey has been an incredible experience for me thus far. I first heard of the New Media Certificate from a friend of mine who is a CS major. She knew that I really liked tech stuff and that even though I was a Marketing major, it could still be very beneficial to my skillset. I did some research on it, and after a second opinion from my advisor, I decided to pursue it.
It started very lax with the intro course (NMIX 2020), where we learned about the advancements in technology over the last few hundred years. It wasn't much of a skill-building course like the rest of the courses would turn out to be, but still very interesting to me nonetheless. Starting NMIX 4010 Web Development and NMIX 4011 New Media Design is where the fun really started, however. I've taken Web Design and Web Development courses in high school before, but that was nearly three years ago. I honestly didn't have a solid grasp of HTML and CSS when I finished that course, so I was really excited to truly develop my skills in this course. The prior HTML and CSS knowledge I had made perfecting my prior skills and developing my new skills much easier. It allowed me to spend more time having fun coding websites since I didn't have to spend extra time practicing certain skills. Learning Bootstrap was so much fun and useful and it's something that I use every single time I code websites. Learning WordPress was much more challenging for me since it was an entirely different approach to building websites, but I know it will be a very useful skill to have since so many websites are made with it. NMIX 4011 was equivocally fun and challenging. Learning how to use the Adobe suite was very challenging for me, but I became particularly fond of Adoble Illustrator. For one of our projects, we had to create a concept for a brand, which included creating a style guide using Canva and designing a logo using Illustrator. I was in charge of designing the logo in my group, and it was incredibly challenging, but so, so satisfying to see the end result.
As of now, these certificate courses, alongside New Media Industries, have helped me develop truly marketable and useful skills that I can see myself using in all my future endeavors. My professors were very enthusiastic to teach the courses and to see our projects every step of the way. They encouraged us every step of the way and made us proud of how far we had come. I'm still in awe every time I compare the first website I made in 4010 to the website I made for my final project. It's crazy to see how much progress I've made in such a short amount of time, and it makes me excited to see what else I'll learn in my future certificate courses.
New Media Web Dev is probably my favorite college course I’ve ever taken, and for multiple reasons. This course was a healthy balance of rigor and enjoyment. Coding has always been daunting to me, but HTML and CSS were especially fun to learn and use. Being able to complete front-end development for websites is a very useful skill to have in the modern era and can be used in a wide variety of fields. It’s challenging, but very rewarding. I’m very proud of all the progress I’ve made throughout the semester and its very evident in the design and function of each website that I’ve made. I look forward to learning more advanced web development in the future. Below are the class projects that we’ve completed throughout the semester, ordered by date.
New Media Design covers four primary bases in design: Principles of Design, Typography and Photography, Brand Design, and UI/UX design. Principles of design taught us basic elements like color theory, the importance of white space, and grid systems. Typography taught us how and when to use different types of fonts and typefaces, and photography taught us how to properly edit photos. I think brand design ended up being the most fun for me. It was very challenging but as marketing major and aspiring product/brand manager, learning how to build a brand (not necessesarily a company) from the ground up is incredibly important and an exceptionally marketable skill to have. UI/UX design was also a lot of fun. I dabble with UI design in my free time, so it felt very fun and natural to work with my teammates to create website and app designs for our brand. I was taking NMIX 4010 Web Development at the same time as this course, so it was quite helpful to incorporate the skills I was learning in this class into the website designs in that one. I'll be taking App Development in the future, and I know that I'll be able to transfer skills from all four of these units into that course too, and I'm very much looking forward to that! Below are a few of the projects I've completed in this class.
New Media Industries, AKA "Digital Brown Bag", strays away from the typical college class structure. It's a class designed to teach us how to be an adult directly from people we'll be like in years to come. Throughout many different seminars we learned multiple different hard skills and soft skills, like how to find a job, how to create boundaries in the workplace, how to develop a proper work/life schedule, the importance of building good credit, etc. I always used to wonder why classes like these didn't exist in high school, so I'm very glad that, at the very least, I got to take one in college.
We only had a few assignments in this class, and all of them were geared towards our personal and professional development. In addition to creating our own professional business cards, we got to choose three assignments to complete over the course of the semester. I chose the personality analysis, credit analysis, and Google Analytics certification. All three of these assignments were time-consuming but well worth it. The personality analysis was an introspective test designed to help you understand how you think and react to things. The credit analysis helped me look at my credit score, understand it, and understand the importance of keeping it stable. The Google Analytics one was also great to have. It was the most challenging development assignment, but as a Marketing major it, will be very useful to have. Being able to network with professionals in addition to these assignments was incredibly helpful and gave me a lot of insight as to what post-grad life is like, what to expect, and how to make the best of it.