weekly reflection #1

 It’s already the end of our first week doing our senior project in New York City. It felt a bit unreal but here we are halfway through our journey. Before going on this trip, I was hesitant and nervous about what would happen in New York because every time I went to New York, I always became overwhelmed by its chaos. I was also scared of getting rejected by people we tried to interview and then being shattered by our failed attempt. 

Feeling uncertain but excited, our journey has begun. On the first day, we went to an extensive art store for art supplies for our poster. The store basically had everything we need, so we got color paper, a huge canvas board, sharpies, glue, collage paper, and so on. While Jack set up the camera and the microphone, Grace and I started organizing the product we’ve got and designing how we want our poster to be. 

I remember on the first interview day, a sunny day, we went to Washington Square where there were many people just chilling in every inch. Grace went up to a girl our age for our first interviewee who was nice but had never been in love before. Even though it wasn’t an answer that we expected, it was still a great start. Then, I went up to an actress-like woman for the next interview. She was so friendly and confident in conversation that I got a lot less nervous and more encouraged in talking to strangers.  

So from then on, our interview process went more and more smooth and has more content of higher quality since we grew to handle the questions better which was also encouraging for our interviewees to answer. Even though we got turned down by some people, we learned to quickly move on because it was actually not a big deal at all. 

After we collected a decent amount of clips, we started to sort out the best ones. Surprisingly, looking back at the videos, we found many of them meaningful. One important lesson I learned outside the courage to interview strangers is everyone’s vision of love. A lot of them are relatable and there was a specific one that I remember is to love yourself first before loving someone else.  

Overall, our first week went a lot more productive than we expected, and I also fell in love with this city this time. Looking forward to more work done and new stuff explored this following week.