Companion Essay

    The Gateway course to the Minor in Writing is supposed to be the first step to a journey in Sweetland, however, I believe my experiments and overall experience in the Gateway course was a journey in itself.  I learned through my experiments and final project who I am not only as a writer but also as a human. I had to make a lot of important decisions and changes along the way, however, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

    My initial idea for what I wanted to accomplish in my experiments was far too ambitious.  Despite knowing I would have less and less time for each experiment, I planned to make the second and third experiments “bigger” than the first.  This turned out to be a little problematic. My first experiment was my smallest and most underwhelming experiment. I made pamphlets about gun safety and skeet shooting.  I began with something small because I wasn’t sure exactly what route I wanted to take on the topic of shooting sports, but the failure of Experiment #1 helped point me in another direction.  

    Experiment #2 was by far my favorite experiment.  For my second experiment, I made a photo essay/timeline documenting my life in shooting sports with my family.  This experiment was way more involved than Experiment #1. I found myself stalking my mother on facebook for all of the pictures and posts of our family at the range.  This also helped me create a timeline because Facebook had the exact date, time, and location, along with anecdotes from my mother about what we were doing in some of the pictures.  Don’t get me wrong, I still had to draw on my memory and journal entries for the majority of this project to expand on the timestamps and descriptions from my mother.

    I don’t think I truly appreciated Experiment #2 until I fully realized it into my final project.  There was a slight bump in the road when I finished Experiment #2 that completely altered the way I was planning on doing Experiment #3.  A very scary event happened on campus that luckily turned out to be a false alarm. It involved a potential shooting that sent everyone into a panic.  After this happened, I was afraid of having shooting sports and firearms tied to my name on the internet for anyone to see. I figured that people would see my website when just looking up my name. This terrified me because I do not like being on the internet at all.  The only thing I regret during the experiment process is the way I snapped at T. I loudly stated that I would “...never get a job with something like this tied to me online”. This state of mind forced me to change what I wanted to accomplish in Experiment #3.

For my third experiment, I wanted to focus more on a theme of identity rather than shooting sports.  I conducted interviews and configured an Instagram page of people doing a sport or hobby that they love and claim to be part of their identity.  For my sample, I interviewed my mom on shooting sports and my friend, Lila, on swimming. I liked this experiment, however, I felt like I strayed too far from my other experiments.

This left me with Experiment #2 to use as my final project.  I was a little scared at first, but working on it took me on a nostalgic trip that made me feel more confident as a person and woman in shooting sports.  The final project came out a little different than I expected my second experiment to go. The final project follows the same format and general guidelines that I set up in Experiment #2 but the way I approached writing (and being comfortable with) it was different.  After doing Experiment #3, I looked at Experiment #2 as more of a declaration of my identity as a woman in shooting sports. I am proud to say that I am a woman in shooting sports and would like to continue sharing my journey mastering them. I think something the reader would not know from looking at my final project is how hard it is to do the different shooting sports- and how different they all are from each other.  It took several years of dedicated practice for me to bond with my firearms and master each skill.

I hope my Eportfolio does my experiments and final project justice.  I am very technologically challenged so it took a great deal of time for me to construct it the way I wanted.  On the morning of our Minor in Writing showcase, I found that my website had crashed and I lost everything except my landing page and first experiment.  This was stressful but I was able to archive a good chunk of it and redo the rest in time. The main thing that I want the viewer of my Eportfolio to take away from it is that shooting sports are part of my identity and take a lot of time and dedication in order to master them.  Also, the skills that I learned in them have shaped me into the person that I am today. The thing that I am most proud of on my Eportfolio is just the fact that I was able to get everything on it in a way that I wanted to. The final project was a little stressful to configure onto my Eportfolio, but I had a good time making it.  I am also proud with how far I’ve come with this Eportfolio. I was really scared of it in the beginning of the process, and now, I am happy and proud to show my work on it.

In the beginning of the semester, I’d say I was a very moody writer with no outlet or understanding of how to transfer my thoughts onto a page cohesively.  I was very shy and timid with the Minor in Writing Blog until I decided that I didn’t want to be like that anymore. I created my own mini project that I called my “Dream Journal” in which I forced myself to post my dreams, random thoughts, memories, etc. for my classmates to see.  The beginning was a little rough because I thought I was spamming people with sad and unwanted pieces in their blog feed. T helped me with a ton of encouragement, however, it seemed to be a little too much as I found myself posting almost every day acting like a teenager with no parental supervision for the first time.  Throughout the process, I learned how to be more comfortable sharing my thoughts and coming up with ideas in an artistic way. I used to hate poetry in high school, but I’ve found that most of my blog posts were poems or songs. Honestly, I would like to keep posting on the blog and continue to grow as a writer.