Reflection on the Final Project

Honestly, while doing this special podcast and discussion on race, the Civil Rights Movement, and Juneteenth I did a great amount of learning. Learning the best way to put together the podcast, learning how to moderate the conversation, learning more about the topics, and learning how to edit what was needed to be edited on the anchor.fm site. I also learned that sometimes you have to be open to not having a set deadline of when you want the podcast to come out because sometimes things are beyond your control and you have to adapt and adjust. Going back to the beginning of how this came together. The idea of having the panel came in the early morning hours several weeks ago and I'm just glad that this was able to be put together in the time when it was the most needed. One of the easiest things about the project was getting people that wanted to be on the panel. I had some folks in mind when the idea came up and for more folks, I asked my professor if she knew somebody and I'm grateful that she did. Another thing is that I also did some research on some of the faculty at Christopher Newport University that is in the American Studies/History Department to try to find a professor that would fit my project. First of all, I was scared that she wouldn't respond in time. I'm so glad that she did because I now have a new connection if I need something. When it was time to have the conversations, I went in not knowing how long it could possibly take. On the ones that were one on one, it was less than 30 minutes. But when I had the first conversation on that Tuesday it was roughly an hour and twelve minutes, while on the second conversation it lasted longer because we got off topic slightly. This one lasted for two hours and six minutes. Even though the topic was slightly off-topic, we still got something out of it. Which was great teaching advice. Something that became a challenge was not being able to ask all of the questions to those that couldn't stay the whole time. Something that I would do differently, is to not ask questions like asking for three things about a topic because pretty much everyone had difficulty with it, which made me cut it out of the podcast. Now to the editing process. It only took me roughly three days to edit. Day 1 was the listening day to figure out who answered what question. Day 2 was finishing that listening part, but It was also when the audio was uploaded to the system and the process of snipping the full audio into sections to determine how long each person spoke. Day 3 was just finishing up the snipping, figuring out which clip is good to use, figuring out the order and putting it all together. The total was about six steps. Overall, I'm very grateful that I was able to have an adult conversation openly about some of the hardest topics to talk about which include race.