Welcome to the second reflection of this Blog post. I have three topics here. Traveling, TC2004 and Semana i. To get you in the right mood for the first topic I will embed a cool song for you my friend. Enjoy!
Traveling:
There are a lot of great activities to do and hobbies to have. But one of the best is traveling. Why is that? When I see all the beautiful places on earth, I think that we are already in paradise, but we are destroying it day by day. There are places, which even surpass your imagination. Therefore, I love to travel and see new places and enjoy their beauty and energy. A journey is always good, even if you had a bad experience, it can open your eyes, so you can see the difference between your current place of living and other places in the world. Maybe this will make you more satisfied with your current situation and appreciate things you didn’t appreciate before.
And Mexico is just a great country to travel. You have everything here, beautiful beaches, desert, jungle, mountains, volcanos, culture, food and much more. For me, it is the greatest opportunity I had so far and I am enjoying it to the fullest.
Traveling changes my mindset and gives me a different view of things, shows me that the same things are valued differently at another place and that there is no such thing as “The only right way to live”. Thanks Mexico, for the opportunity to experience your beauty, culture and impressions.
TC2004
In this partial, I had the second meeting with Ken, which was cool. It is nice to have a professor who really cares. Not only for your assignments, grade and projects, but for you as a person. We had a very nice chat about every kind of things. Thanks for that!
Further the Mastery Topics reminded me of why I study something with three different topics (economics, engineering and informatics). The blog entries are not only interesting for computer scientists or future computer scientists. Even people who have studied something else, such as economics, and have something to do with computer science in their everyday lives or jobs, can use the contributions to build a better understanding (at least that’s what I hope). Therefore, it is important to link words that are not so common. With this I want to make my contributions all readable and make them more interesting in the future.
I hope that I can implement this in the next blog post!
Furthermore, I got new insights into the creation of software. As already mentioned, I was fascinated by nearly everything during my internship in Cost Engineering and I am convinced that in the future Cost Engineers will also be needed for the development of software. Through the Mastery Topics I build a good foundation in this area and broadened my horizon as (maybe) future cost engineer. I am looking forward to learning the final steps of planning for software development through the next Mastery Topics.
Semana i, Impressed by Mexico.
Semana i is a week of activities, you have a lot of different things offered. Yoga, cooking, spiritual discussions in groups and much more. What is the semana i good for? I think it’s a great idea to give the students an opportunity to do something they are interested in, but never tried or they don’t work with usually. Most of the activities are for free or very cheap, which is great. Furthermore, you can get up to five 5% for every single course. I was very impressed by that idea, especially the program they provided for the students abroad. It’s called “Impressed by Mexico”, therefore, you have 5 days to travel and get to know Mexico better. You can choose the destination, of course it must be in Mexico. All you have to do is a video about your trip, which can be used by the university to encourage other students to make such. Sounds like a great idea, right? You can travel wherever you want and make a creative video about it and show what impressed YOU the most.
Sadly, it’s not like that. The video has many regulations, strict regulations. How to film it, how to work with pictures, how to work with your voice and what kind of places to visit. If you don’t do it exactly like that, they will subtract points. E.g. if you used the voiceover technique for more than 50% of the speaking time, they will subtract half of your points in this valuation. But at the same time background noises are undesirable, well … what am I supposed to do then? Tell the people to stop talking, making noises and driving around with their car?
Use your imagination and creativity to create an audio-visual storytelling project displaying the perspectives you have experienced during this week.
– International Office
How can I be creative when you put so much regulations into the assignment, how can I show what impressed ME the most, if I have a weak connection to arts but still need to include it in the video. If not, again, “subtraction” of points. Yes, I understand that you also need regulations to make the grading easier, but is this the best way of doing so?.
In my opinion, they should have made some small regulations like length of the video, quality, every group member should be included in the video and tell us the goal of the video. The rest should be left free. Why? Because WE can show you what WE learned, what impressed US the most and how we would want to show you and everyone else what impressed us about Mexico. On my trip, I had to think most of the time which picture or scene would fit into your regulations. It was not possible to enjoy every moment because of that, to use my recordings to show how I see Mexico and how I was impressed by it. It’s a pity, who knows if I will have the chance to come back to Mexico one more time to get impressed by it. I think that you have to give your students a bit more freedom, so they can unfold and evolve. If you give everything to someone, he will never learn to decide for himself how to do it well, independence and self-responsibility will be completely lost.
For me the activity „impressed by Mexico“ is a great idea which unfortunately was not implemented well.
Once again, it won’t get any better than this, I guess. Also in this reflection, I didn’t want to talk about the M.T. so much because you have already read it (@Ken).
So as always, thank you for sticking around.
See you on my next post.
-SolidSnake8
The right blog to be. 