The Portfolio Experience
The idea of a portfolio is to showcase parts of your work in order to convey an idea of the whole. Because an ongoing theme of my education and personal learning has been balancing the duality between specialization and diversification, my portfolio is meant to reflect that. Each of the artifacts attempts to expose different facets of my learning throughout my five-year journey at the UW. The layout, though, is completely temporal and very linear, suggestng that participants in the experience will follow a straightforward path through it. It is arguable that a more leisurely viewer might take a peripatetic route, but I think that's ok too; the work may show a progression in my thinking process as I went from 1st year to 5th year, but I don't explicitly make that a theme in itself. I don't imagine many stumbling blocks to navigation, as the pages are very clearly demarcated by their quarter and year. The only thing that may prevent users from having a completely immersive experience is how much text there sometimes is; I don't know if anyone is actually going to take the time to read through all my writings in depth.
This collection is definitely different than what a typical portfolio aimed at earning exposure among potential employers is meant to do. Because I do focus a lot on breadth, there is no concentration of artifacts in one particular area. I do pride myself on quality regardless of the discipline, so I wouldn't go so far as to say my work is amateur, but I can admit without pause that I would fall short of the artifacts that are theoretically contained in a focused portfolio. In the future, I imagine my portfolio to be more focused and showcase more computer science, chemistry, music, travel, or teaching-related artifacts, as those are things that I'm passionate about. I would probably want to segregate by discipline as well.
One thing that I wish I could make more clear is the importance of the title images up top. Each of the images represents a particular pursuit I engaged in during my UW career. I just haven't found a finessed way to convey their source. Perhaps some fine print down below?
This collection is definitely different than what a typical portfolio aimed at earning exposure among potential employers is meant to do. Because I do focus a lot on breadth, there is no concentration of artifacts in one particular area. I do pride myself on quality regardless of the discipline, so I wouldn't go so far as to say my work is amateur, but I can admit without pause that I would fall short of the artifacts that are theoretically contained in a focused portfolio. In the future, I imagine my portfolio to be more focused and showcase more computer science, chemistry, music, travel, or teaching-related artifacts, as those are things that I'm passionate about. I would probably want to segregate by discipline as well.
One thing that I wish I could make more clear is the importance of the title images up top. Each of the images represents a particular pursuit I engaged in during my UW career. I just haven't found a finessed way to convey their source. Perhaps some fine print down below?