I feel as though I have worked hard up until this point to ensure that the work me and my group produce is of a high standard and meets the deadlines and criteria set by the course.
For the group research report, I initially took a bit of a step back from roles that went too far beyond the minimum required of each of us (ie. researching, writing my 1000 words, attending meetings, contributing to discussions, making decisions etc.), because the week the assignment was due was my birthday week/weekend, meaning I was pressed for time already with a trip home to Ballarat and various other plans in Melbourne. I also knew I would be away the day of the industry feedback event, so I was planning on putting my energies into the preproduction so that I could do my part for that, and so although we kept the work spread pretty evenly, I had to be choosy about which jobs I could and couldn’t take on.
In particular, it meant I didn’t volunteer to edit or format the report since that would have to be done the day of my 21st, however I did go to meet with the group on the day to talk through the final steps and make sure everyone was on track. Luckily, those roles were taken up by other group members and I could spend time focusing on the invites for the industry feedback event.
I read the essay over once it had been edited only to find that little had been done to make the essay sound like ‘one voice’ apart from removing subtitles, and so I took on the role of editor no. 2 and went through and corrected the whole essay – a job which ended up taking just under a day. I didn’t expect the edit to take so long, only there were huge portions I had to correct, including poor referencing, grammar, incoherent sentences and an entire section plagiarised from wikipedia (all in one particular part of the essay). After a few group messages and a bit of a rewrite, I was able to ask people for smaller things such as a reference here and there and soon the report was ready to be handed in, however it’s still frightening for me to think that if I had trusted the initial edit and not read over the ‘final’ version, we all would have been caught out for plagiarism, when overall most of us worked hard and produced good pieces of writing. In this respect, I personally feel like I went above and beyond what should have been my even share of work, however I am glad that I did because I realise how much our mark could have been impacted on if I hadn’t.
With the report out of the way, my focus was turned to inviting guests for the industry event (and what a task that turned out to be!). I ended up inviting guests for three of the groups as opposed to just my own since I thought I’d be away on the actual day and was trying to do my part as best I could, however it ended up being so difficult to get replies from potential guests, and even harder to then get an ‘attending’. There were a lot of invites sent out right before the event to try and get more numbers (I sent over twenty invites in total) but to no real avail. Still, we ended up with six guests on the day, and due to a budget change in Big Sound (where I was meant to be working over the time the industry event was on) I was actually able to attend. This meant I pitched in a bit more, organising the thank you cards and helping to run our station, meaning I was able to do things such as write up the questionnaire for our guests and answer questions on the day.
