Not my first Portfolio Rodeo (My SECOND)
This was not my first attempt at a portfolio, but it was certainly the best one. Back in high school, I made one to show off my phenomenal communications abilities and proficiencies. Judging by the school picture I used, it was not my best foot forward, and it genuinely makes me say YIKES! in hindsight. On the right is a comparison of what four years will do. While it was not required to apply to communications schools across the country, it helped me stand out.
Now, four years later, it is required. Putting my best foot forward with my employees is of the utmost importance, and showing off my skills is pretty much mandatory.
While my content here certainly has more meaning than the previous portfolio. Thoughtful projects with intentions to tell a story are at the forefront, and my personality can really shine through on every piece. There are aspects of community service, public safety, and automotive education and community sprinkled throughout. My favorite of these pieces has to be my photo essay, which was honestly the one I was dreading the most. It worried me because it was one of the pieces of mine that strayed furthest from my portfolio’s subject material: CARS. Instead, it centers around my fraternity’s philanthropic work with Habitat for Humanity, using the fraternity’s color scheme to guide the essay.
While I loved the content I created, things that truly were a joy to make, I felt an extreme sense of guilt. The most memorable pieces that I can remember my classmates making were:
A podcast on mental health stigmas around being an athlete
A mini doc on someone with dwarfism
A mini doc on an area of conservation
A PSA on identifying heart attacks, with a personal anecdote
A PSA on sexual assault
My classmates would create a hard-hitting piece about someone in the community with a sad, yet inspiring story or how to make our community greener or more accepting or something like that. I would then follow these with a piece about loud racecars (see left) and it made me feel like I was doing something wrong.The reality is, I was just trying to keep the same angle – cars – for every project. I could have made these, but did I want to? No. Would I have enjoyed it? No. Would it have been authentic? No again.
The reality is that I have an extensive mental health background – bigger than anyone in my class and probably anyone I know at Furman. I just choose not to play an angle like that because I don’t let past traumas and experiences define who I am and it’s not something I want my life to revolve around. It’s a shame that my work makes me come across as shallow, but it is the reality I created.
Because my work came off as shallow, it made me not be proud of my work during presentations because it felt less impactful than others when shown side-by-side on a projector. While it is likely true, the beauty of my portfolio is that now my work has the privilege of standing alone with nothing else to directly compare it to. The only theme is my love of cars, and I am the only one with the authority to change it.
Difficulties I encountered while creating this website were few and far between. I have a lot of experience with Squarespace already, and this was one of the simplest interactions I have ever had with it. I had an entrepreneurial phase back in 2021, where I put three different businesses on the platform, one in person, two e-commerce. Incorporating business and payment into a website is a whole different animal, but it at least it prepared me for the frontier of content creation. Not many issues come to mind when using Squarespace. The only one I can think of is the platform’s heavy reliance on high quality photography – something I didn’t have much of (due to a very old phone). Apart from that, I cannot recommend it enough.
What would I do differently? Maybe take my content in a different direction. As much as I hate to say it, maybe less authentic but more meaningful content may have made my portfolio better. At the bare minimum, I now have a cool place to keep all the future car content I do create.
