Day: June 17, 2023

Marketing Myself

Helloooo world of blog. I haven’t really done any blog posts yet this year specifically about my careers class so guess what we are talking about today? Yep my Personal Growth planning aka PGP aka Careers class and what we’ve been working on.

So how does one market themselves? In this case, I am talking about marketing yourself in terms of job opportunities through things like resumes and business cards. The choices that you make when choosing how to present yourself to potential employers can greatly influence your chances of getting that job. So this section of our PGP class set out to prepare us for the job hunting and professional self-presentation of our futures.

Driving Question;

How do I make career life choices?

Answer – planning. Let me explain;

We started by looking at our dream careers and our realistic careers, what those jobs would initial and what the prerequisites were. And then finding the prerequisites for those prerequisites and so on. What schools do you want to go to? How far from home are you willing to travel for university/college? What degree do you need? Where do you want to end up living? What’s your financial situation going to look like? Etc. Answering all these questions is essential to planning out any career life choice you make. Tracing out where you want to go and how to get there is how you make career life choices, or at least how you make good career life choices.

And to help us start making these career life choices, we started answering the question “How can I effectively market myself to employers?” To convey our answers to this question, we each made new resumes, business cards, and a cover letter draft that we could send out to potential employers.

The Resumes

Above you will see my updated resumes that I made during this course. I really like the one that has my picture on it because it separates my qualities/soft skills from my skills. An employer can make their decision just by a quick glance over a resume so it is important that they are neat and organized in layout. I think I did a wonderful job creating an appealing resume that accurately reflects me marketing myself.

The Business Cards

As you can see above, I have 2 different business cards. One I chose to do a simple black and white with minimal information and personality, the other is coloured and has some line graphics on it. I like the beige aesthetic one because it feels more personal and includes my title as student/sales associate.

The Mock Interview

Finally, we did mock job interviews. My partner Dana and I spent a lot of time carefully picking out interview questions that we thought displayed a good mix of our skills and personality, being sincere with our answers as well. We came into school dressed professionally and ready to shoot. We then dressed up and filmed the interview with both people answering and asking the questions. Practicing like it was a real interview helped me feel better prepared for any interviews I will have to do in the future because I already know what questions may be thrown at me and how I should respond to show off my best self. I think this interview shows off my skills in communication and my passion for my interests, but I’ll let you judge for yourself. Here is the video Dana and I made (I’m the brunette);

Conclusion

Overall this section of PGP has made me feel more confident in my abilities to get another job in the future when I leave the one I am currently at. I am excited to use my new resumes and maybe even hand out a business card or two. It was sometimes difficult to find colours or fonts that matched my personality, and trust me you can spend a very long time flipping through fonts that just dont feel quite right. But being able to critically think about one’s future is a skill I have always loved to use and exercising that in this project was very helpful for me. Thanks for reading!

As Always, Brooke

So Many Lies And Incongruences

Content warning; there will be mentions of residential schools, missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, and other traumatic events for First Nations peoples.

This is not the first time we learned about Canada’s wrongdoings towards indigenous peoples in class, and it wont be the last.

Keystone 1

Keystone 1 for this project was reading the book The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline and filling out reflections and contributions each week relating to the chapters we read. This reminded me a lot of the “Lit circles” we used to do in elementary school, and I really enjoyed it. First of all, The Marrow Thieves is an amazing book that I had heard of prior to reading it in class, so I was super excited to be analyzing it. I would like to share with you my journal of reflections and contributions, so SPOILER WARNING if you havent read it yet.

Reading Journal pdf

As you may have seen, for some of my contributions I chose to make art pieces, and in one case an animation (that you would not have seen because that file is a PDF and cannot play the video but trust me it was cool). I usually don’t like making art because I find that my perfectionism gets in the way and I end up just giving up on  the art. But I really wanted to do something different that wasn’t just a piece of writing and I am super proud of how they turned out.

At the end of the journal there is a reflection answering the question “How does The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline reflect Canada presently and historically?” And I would like to charge a clip of that reflection with you now.

The characters in the book experienced loss of family, both chosen family and biological, just like indigenous people did during the time of residential schools and especially the sixties scoop. They were unable to know if their loved ones was alive or where they were taken, a heartbreaking type of pain to feel that was felt by a whole race of people. This type of pain is felt heavily even to this day because of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada. The ramifications of the colonizers treatment of indigenous peoples in both the book and real life have long lasting consequences that will not be forgotten.

Keystone 2

DQ – How can art and text reflect both the history and our current place in time?

The driving question for this project can be answered by the work I did in keystone 2. Here is a brief look at what keystone 2 is about and the competencies that went along with it ⬇️

Keystone 2 was completed in 3 parts; history, contemporary issues, and civil disputes, and how each of those topics could be found in art. For each topic we had to find an art piece (could be any kind of art including music) and tie it to a specific topic or event that related to the main topic (I.e. Canada’s peace and friendship treaties for history or MMIWG).

For part 1 I chose to focus on historical peace and friendship treaties. I chose a piece of art that I found on a website with a research paper dedicated to Canada’s peace and friendship treaties. Lnuey.ca was an excellent source that I found for this topic and extremely helpful for writing.

Here is the art I chose that directly symbolizes the peace and friendship treaties. I encourage you to go to this link to see my write up on what the peace and friendship treaties ment and how this painting is represented. Keystone 2 pt 1. Treaties & Art 

Part 2 was about contemporary issues that indigenous people face culturally and how that can be seen in art.

For this I chose to focus on cultural appropriation. I was researching artists who were indigenous activists when I came across Kent Monkman, a Cree artist from Manitoba. With some help, I searched through his gallery on his website to find a painting that I felt could tie into the cultural appropriation topic. This lead to us finding a painting called “Welcome to the Studio”. This painting is actually too large to be imbedded here without me cropping it up so you will have to see it in my writing reflection -> Contemporary issues and art.

The final part of keystone 2 was a similar task to the first 2 parts, but this time it was related to a civil conflict. I chose to focus on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls because I think it is a powerful topic that is still very prevalent today. My reflection shows the connection to the red handprint and red dress movements that we see today as activism for this issue. The link to my full reflection can be found here -> MMIWG and art

The Collage

The final product of this project was a collage (physical or digital) showing what we had learned over the course of the project. Along with this came a short written reflection on our learnings and what we can do for truth and reconciliation.

I feel guilty now as a Canadian looking back on what my country did to the First Nations peoples. I had a pretty good understanding of most of this information before we started this project but I always felt that it didn’t affect me much. I learned much more about how the history of Canada’s wrongdoings against the First Nations people still affects them to this day through intergenerational trauma, lateral violence and cultural appropriation. I can contribute to Canada’s truth and reconciliation by continuing to learn and take seriously the lessons we are taught on this topic. Especially next year in my BC First Peoples class.

 

Conclusion

So this project contained a lot of heavy topics and was very impactful. During this project I heard someone say “If you feel comfortable about truth and reconciliation, you’re not doing it right.” And that really hit home for me because it is on the shoulders of us white colonizers to right the wrongs of our ancestors in any way we can. I did excellent work throughout this project and really showed off my authenticity and raw willingness to learn and participate, some skills that have grown immensely for me over the past year. Thank you for reading this post.

As Always, Brooke