A Difficult Conversation

September 17, 2016Leave a comment

I don’t think I myself have ever really delivered a difficult message to someone else. Probably because I am a very emotional person that I have learned to walk around other people’s feelings because I can’t handle hard conversations. Most difficult conversations I’ve had have always been directed towards me rather than me trying to confront a person.

The hardest conversation I have probably had was during the summer before starting college. My friends and I just returned from our senior year trip from Florida. We had a bit of a fight over how we were spending our last few days together, which ended up ruining the rest of the trip.

My friend Disha and I were getting antsy during the trip. Disha and I really wanted to take advantage of being in Florida and explore Miami, where as every day my other friends decided to lounge around on the beach all day.

Because of all the complaints, by the time we returned home my friends began shutting Disha and I out. After about a month of silence, Disha and I decided to confront all my other friends about the situation in which they ended up lashing out and saying things like we were never friends, to begin with even though we had known each other for almost ten years.

In the end, they ended up cutting Disha out of their lives, but I had been able to salvage my relationship with all of them. It wasn’t the same as before, but we found a way to move on and just not talk about the situation.

When I found a way to forgive my friends Disha began shutting me out and would stop talking to me through out our first year in college. It hurt at first, but as time passed, I grew used to the idea of never talking to her again even though we still remain distant “friends”. I wish I had enough strength to tell her that I feel like she completely replaced me in her life and that it hurts to be shut out. But at the same time, I could understand her position.

May be if I wasn’t so emotional and things between me and my other group of friends weren’t so complicated I may have approached her. At the same time, with college, I just feel like I have moved on and would rather not revisit the past.

Marketing Schematic

September 13, 2016September 13, 2016Leave a comment

prompt

Please create a simple diagram that depicts your understanding of the financial markets and its key players. Please submit this electronically.

The best work will have achieved the following:

Identified 3 or 4 (or more) different markets e.g. Capital, Money, Currency, Commodities, Derivatives
2. Named intermediaries (“players”) and instruments
3. Identified primary and secondary markets
4. Presented clear graphics and gave a concise explanation in their own words

diagram

Website Project Specification

September 13, 2016September 20, 2016Leave a comment

This week in web design, we are starting to design our websites by answering questions about our overall approach as well as develop a basic layout for what we hope to achieve.

Questions

What is the purpose of the website?

I plan to use this website to mainly my portfolio work from Parsons, as well as sketches and projects I’ve work on in the past during my free time. Although we were given portfolios by the school for our work with WordPress, I don’t really like using the default themes and would like to create a portfolio that sort of flows better and is more suited for my style.

I also want to integrate this with some marketing research I have done in the past while I attended NYU.

Who is the intended audience?

Potential employers peers, and anyone who might stumble upon the website. I hope to create a fully functioning website that I might be able to transfer the coding later on onto WordPress or some sort of blogging platform.

What tone do you want for the site’s written content?

The portfolio posts might be more formal as a lot of my work does contain a lot of essays. However, I also want the tone to be more lighthearted to reflect more of my personality rather than being so informational. I really want this website to be a place where I can just show the world who I am and I can write freely the things I want with no particular focus

Design

Landing Page

I used to run a blog called monkeychic.com. I have had this blog since I was in middle school and it basically shows a progression of my interests and what I have learned throughout my life since then. I stopped seriously blogging around high school and used the blog to primarily just post marketing projects I have worked on in school or work I have completed in Parsons. However, some of the pictures and links are broken.

I really want to use this project to do a complete make over of my blog/portfolio and make the entire thing just flow together better while also just primarily focusing on my project work.

My landing page is going to be a tricky thing to design as I don’t have a whole lot of photographs of my work that I am too proud of. Some of my content sometimes is all words and no images. Some of my posts have a lot of images, but none I am too proud of. Some my posts might have a particular image I want to really showcase.

So for the landing page, I am thinking of first creating a carousel to display any posts I really want to feature.

Below I will just have previews of recent posts. My biggest concern for this is that since not every post has a photo, but some will, these previews have to look nice whether or not the post features any image. I may turn these black and white or fade them as well so that the photos don’t have to have a particular style and still work well.

Navigation

The portfolio section will have three categories; projects, parsons, and research. Projects are going to be the main portion of this category. After school is over I still plan to use my site as my main portfolio website and I want to be able to post any project whether they are simple sketches or full blown designs onto here. Parsons will focus on any work I complete during my past and remaining years at Parsons. Lastly, Research will be where I will add all my old marketing projects from courses I had taken at NYU and I will continue adding to this in the future if I continue doing some more research projects.

The portfolio categories will also have their own sub categories because for Parsons I want to be able to discuss which posts belong to which courses. For research, which posts are from when I was in NYU and which are going to be from the future. Projects might have more categories to divide which projects are digital projects, hand done, sketches, and miscellaneous (things I work on that doesn’t fit in a particular category, resources, or inspirations).

My navigation will be displayed on the header, a side bar and may be certain links on the footer.

Secondary Content

Home, About, Social Media and Contact Me (email)

Sidebar

Short About Me and Picture, Contact Email, Subscribe (Email, RSS, Bloglovin), Social media (Instagram preview), Archives (By Month), Recent Posts, Digital NYU Certificates

Inspiration

http://www.thewonderforest.com/

https://www.zoella.co.uk/

http://blog.boatpeopleboutique.com/

https://laurenconrad.com/

https://laurenconrad.com/blog/2016/03/welcome-to-the-new-laurenconrad-com/

http://thebeautydepartment.com/

http://cargocollective.com/briemery

http://www.seaofshoes.com/

http://www.wix.com/blog/2015/12/15-magnificent-websites-created-by-artists-and-illustrators/

http://rckt.co.uk/

http://www.kristyu.com/#home

Website Tree

Layouts

Landing page

Post Page

About Me

Contact Sheet

A Time I Failed

September 5, 2016Leave a comment

The summer before my junior year in high school, I decided to enroll in a four-week program at the University of Pennsylvania. I would be taking Calculus and Micro Economics with other kids in my program as well as a few undergraduates at UPenn. At that time the university had been my dream school. I had it in mind that I in two years I would attend Wharton as a business and marketing major.

I was so nervous the day I arrived. I intended to meet various professors at this dream school and get A’s all my classes. But I think I ended up idolizing this one school so much that is only lead me to choke in my classes and ultimately fail.

To start off, I felt pretty confident to start Calculus. I wasn’t too bad in my high school math classes, so I figured how bad could it be. To my shock, my teacher had a heavy Russian accent and she would rush through her sentences. Before I could get half of what she wrote on the chalk board, everything would be erased.

So every day I would go back to my dorm and I think, “Okay, I will just try hard to understand my textbook then, may be that will help me understand what I am doing better.” But, no such luck. The textbook turned out to be just a bunch of questions and no explanations. The only way I could understand what I was looking at was to go through my half written notes and Kahn Academy.

I didn’t understand why I just couldn’t grasp all this information in my classes. All the other kids in my program would be having fun learning and then taking their breaks while I felt miserable and would never be caught without my books. One day our program even took us to Hershey park for a weekend and instead of going on the rides like everyone else, I found a bench to sit on while I tried my hardest to read while wind blew around my pages because I still didn’t come close to understanding what I was supposed to be learning in class.

But, I didn’t want to give up yet. I scheduled and attended office hours with my teacher in which she would show me and answer to a problem then crumple up the answers and tell me I couldn’t have them because I need to learn this on my own.

I was coming quite close to failing, and all the time I spent trying to understand Calculus, I missed out on the time to speak to the professors like I had intended earlier and didn’t get to completely study for my economics course.

In the end, I dropped the course with a Pass/Fail grade and had a C in my economics class. But, my failure didn’t end there. I was so ashamed of what I had done and thought I was so stupid for not understanding what I had done wrong. So like the scuba diver in “The Art of Failing” by Malcolm Gladwell, I tried grasping for ways out of my situation, which only made me sink harder.

I began looking for ways to hide my grades from my parents and when I was alone I would panic and scream with my head spinning from the pressure. I didn’t know how long I could keep my grades a secret. Then one day my parents found out I had been lying about my grades, which got me into more trouble. Not because I did so badly in school, but because I hid my grades for so long.

In comparison to the stories from “The Art of Failure”, I think the first part of this story my failure definitely resulted in me choking on tests. It’s not that I was bad at math, but may be because I went into this school with all these built up expectations, which lead to me constantly messing up my exams. Then the lying came from me panicking about when to do, and I grabbed for a solution without really thinking about what I was doing. I ended up causing more trouble this way and couldn’t recover before it was too late.

In relation to reading “Managing Oneself” by Peter Drucker, he tells us to ask ourselves what are my strengths, how do I perform, what are my values, where do I belong, and how should I contribute? At that time, I know a lot of my performance had dropped because I had so much doubt in myself. I went in expecting to do well, but at the same time as each day rolled by I started to doubt my abilities to understand concepts more and more. I felt out of place in the class like everyone was smarter than me and that it even mattered if they were. Always being truthful with your family is one of the core values my dad had always taught me since I was little. However, when I panicked, I completely threw that out of the window.

Web Design Comparison

September 4, 2016September 4, 2016Leave a comment

This week in web design, students were asked to write an analysis focusing on a well-designed website and a poorly designed website. In order to understand the principles of good web design, we based our analysis off of the article Usability 101: Introduction to Usability by Jakob Nielsen. We then proceeded to compose our own basic website using the write-ups we just made.

A Less Effective Web Site

I was a bit disappointed when I went through my Financial Management syllabus to look for the textbook I would be using this year. My teacher had provided a link to purchase the textbook from in which the site offers various options to read your book. As printouts, on their website, or as delivered as a hard copy. In my opinion, this site is not the most user-friendly when it comes to reading online. Especially when compared to other websites available for purchasing online books such as Kindle.

To begin with, their Homepage looks like it was pulled straight from the early 2000’s. There are barely any images on the website. If the website wasn’t named Textbookmedia.com, you probably wouldn’t be able to even understand what the page would be even used for. All it offers is a brief description of the company, a search bar at the bottom of the page, and a small image advertising an offer for their study guides.

This site also has a long “How it Works” page with information clumped together and poor choice of font colors. On this page, there is also a random image of a man in black and white that is probably about an inch in width that seems to hold no real purpose.

Moving onto their product listing page there are no images of the books, quick browsing options, or even pricing ranges, so the only way you can view what book you are selecting is by actually going to the individual product pages. Then on the product page itself, there are no reviews of the books and the site doesn’t do much to simplify the books information.

The thing I dislike the most is the websites, ways of actually reading the book. You can’t scroll through the pages, instead, you are forced to click on two arrow buttons that are placed very far apart from each other. You can download PDFs of the book, but that option isn’t very clear as that option only appears when you click on a printer button. Then the table of contents is sort of sloppily placed together and hard to read.

Overall, in terms of usability, I don’t think the site is hard to learn or memorize. However, its biggest problems are efficiency, errors, and satisfaction. The website does not simplify a lot of the tasks that need to be done by the user. It looks very dated and the graphics seem to have a very low resolution as well.

A Well-Designed and Effective Web Site

Now when it comes to a shopping website, it is best to keep things as clean and simple as possible in my opinion. Shopping is usually (not always) a reward for some people. They work really hard for their money, and now they enjoy the pleasures of spending their money on something new. Because of this, many shoppers won’t have the patience if a store is too cluttered with information, or there is not enough information. So it is the company’s job to make the shopping experience as enjoyable as possible for the buyers or else they will just end up frustrated and leave the shop empty handed.

There are some eCommerce sites that are phenomenal when it comes to web design. They’ll play around with the graphics and animation of features to make the website look lively and bring their store character, but for today I am just going to focus on a simple shop that I think works well even without all the frills.

Romwe.com is a clothing store that I occasionally like to buy from. It may not offer textbooks like my bad website example, but it’s essentially also a shopping platform that you can buy things off of.

The front page has a nice carousel with different trends and outfits from their shop as well as any deals and promotions they currently offer as well as the coupons and spread throughout the site if you somehow miss the homepage.

The thing I love most about their homepage is that they have deals on certain items in their store with the old price and mark-down price as well as a counter for how much longer the deal will last. You can also save items to your wishlist instead of going straight to cart. Also, if you hover over the item you would like there is an option to add to cart without even having to go to the product page. Then on their product list pages, there is a scroll to top button to make the page easier to use for their customers.

On the bottom of their homepage, they also have images gathered from social media when users write a certain hashtag when posting about their pieces.

I really like this website because they are able to deliver as much information about a product possible while also keeping the sites design as clean as possible which also makes it easy to navigate around.

Amanda Wu

Parsons Portfolio

Month: September 2016