Marketing & Communications
CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT OF CONFLICT
As a photographer, social media had always played an important role in my life in showcasing my works. In my third semester, I joined the marketing and communications ExEd as I wanted to explore a different use of the platforms – one that is more official and demanding to challenge myself in expanding my creativity and creating new contents. With my previously extensive use of the media, I also thought it would be beneficial to turn my interest into profession and help the school connect with others outside it.
In the ExEd I was given the control over UWC USA's Facebook and Instagram accounts. The goal this year was to keep them as active as possible by having at least 1 post a day. This is to keep others outside of the school – students interested in joining the community, alumni, sponsors, and many others – informed about the ongoing activities. As the entire ExEd team would be doing so under the same name – UWC USA – it was important for us to work collaboratively. The ExEd members met with Gwen, the ExEd supervisor, at least once a week to discuss the important events that would be happening in each week and assign them to each person. My task after would be to attend the event, photograph, write a brief description to it, send them to Gwen for refinement, and then post on all the social media.
The assignments were a lot of fun to me. From before that I merely took photos for the sake of aesthetics, I now understood the photographic art of story telling as I had to attend the events and understand the context of them to write descriptions. I learned to select and capture images that portray emotions associated with the event – images of people socializing and having fun in an informal gathering, concentrating on their works in a science experiment, or carefully paying attention to the speaker in a meeting. Sometimes, when there were other participants from outside the school, I would also talk to them to gain a better understanding of who they were and what influenced them to hold the activities at our school. This way, I got to know more people outside of our community.
Example of some of my works from the ExEd
In addition to my photography skills, my writing skills were also improved. In the first posts, my descriptions were refined by Gwen to the point that I almost could not recognize them as my own. Never had a problem in writing before, I was extremely confused and even became less confident in my skills. However, after a few tries, I soon began to recognize the patterns in Gwen's writing and what it had that was missing from mine. I realized that marketing content writing was in a completely different field of what I had done before. The biggest tips I learned were to pick and choose the most important details of each event and portray them in the most attractive way and to keep my descriptions concise – not too elaborative, as the audience would lose interest, but also not too brief that no information was transferred. While the power of social media allows us to reach others who are far away, it is in fact the power of language that convinces them to connect with us.
One challenge that often came up to the team was the lack of content in some weeks. Despite how our weekends were packed with events and special days, there were still not enough to fill in the remaining 5 days of the week. Therefore, I was required to come up with new content that would also be interesting to the target audience. Most of the times, I chose to document the common activities of us students as it best portrayed our daily lives here. As a result, whenever I saw an interesting interactions between students, I immediately think about creating a content from it. This allowed me to become more engaged not only in the ExEd as I presented Gwen with more photos outside of my assignments, but also with the people around me.
There were more challenges that came up throughout the semester. To name one, I was once given the assignment to take photos of the hot springs clean up and send them by the next day. However, the clean up was moved to the next weekend. As the tasks were already assigned, I realized it was my responsibility to cover up for the missing content. After going through the list of other activities that would be going on in the weekend, I decided that my best option would be to ask a friend for photos from their trip to Santa Fe so it could also be posted in time for the next day. I had trouble contacting my friends as most of them did not have internet data, but eventually managed to do so. On top of every skills I have learned from the ExEd, I think this is the most important one: to be flexible and open to changes that could happen at anytime.
Example of some of my works from the ExEd