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Project FAT was definitely the best quartile – best project I have ever worked on while studying here. Not only did I learn a lot of things, but I also met some amazing people, which I am now glad to call my friends. Everyone has a different talent, a different character and a different style. Therefore, we created a very creative team, where trust and respect were two of our most important values. From the first day, we created our own rules and we made our goals and aspirations clear – this helped a lot.

 

We went through a lot, since we started with Max’s, Marieke’s and Sacha’s concept from Project New Start Up, and we thought we were ahead of every other team. Well, this didn’t last long, since we realized that this project wasn’t working for us. Taking Shtilyan in our team, was a great choice and I am so glad we did! He came in with a fresh mind and helped us when we were stuck. He helped us create the Shape of Sounds.

 

The Justification classes with Sarah were also SO GOOD! I loved that we had such ‘classes’ with a coach and the team. We talked about how we perceive each other, and honestly, nobody expected what happened. Even though we only know each other for a few weeks, we understood so many things about each one of us. Personal traits, behaviors that we need to improve because they might be causing us some unnecessary stress and discomfort. It was great, not only listening the good perception my teammates had for me, but also to take some advice from them.  

 

One thing that made me feel ‘uncomfortable’ sometimes, or a bit lost, was the fact that we were three people with similar goals. Shtilyan, Marieke and I, are both in design, advertising/campaigns etc. Therefore, it was kind of hard to separate the work. Since one of my roles was to get more comfortable with programming, we decided that I would be responsible for the database of the project. Marieke handled the sponsors/partnerships and Shtilyan made our designs. The only part left, was the responsibility of the social media which I handled. We didn’t have a lot of content though, so it was hard to keep a more active profile.

 

I spent a lot of time doing research on our target group and on trends in the Netherlands and also learned about the use of promotion in Fb and IG. Most of the time though, I spent on trying out things for the backend development of our site and our installation. I had to overcome a lot of challenges and I was telling my team that I don’t want them to rely on me because I didn’t have any knowledge on web scrapping, python, php, firebase etc. However, they believed in me and with patience and perseverance, talks with Yiwei and Yvens, difficulties disappeared, and obstacles vanished. Max really helped me with implementing the code in our Unity project and explained what he did. It was great to learn new things.

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I also took responsibility of documenting our whole process. I kept taking pictures and videos everyday, posting on our stories

 

As for next year, my goal is to work harder on programming, (finally learn C#) and put more time and effort into it. Every time I finish a programming project, I get so excited by the result and I realize that I wish I had a deeper understanding and more knowledge on different languages. So, that’s my challenge for the following months!