The time has come. For the next few weeks, my social life is over.
The dreaded time for assessment deadlines has started to appear on the horizon.
I had the week from hell last week. My first assessment was due by Friday – for creative writing.
We share the creative writing lectures with English degree students. This is the problem. Although I am a fair writer and could come up with a short fictional story easily enough, we are also expected to write a self-reflective piece, in which we must include a structured evaluation of our own work.
I have no clue how I am meant to discuss ‘character delineation’, ‘analeptic’, or ‘prolepsis’. Apparently, ‘death of the author’ does not mean that the author dies…
I am lost, and so are the rest of my journalism classmates.
However, my creative writing lecturer has been more than helpful and has gone ‘above and beyond’ to help the less informed among us with their essays, with one-to-one chats and evaluations of our work, kindly nudging us in the right direction when we have attempted to enter the ‘inverted pyramid’ of a fictional tale.
Honestly, that assessment was the last thing on my mind this week. Our magazine project has – as expected – taken over everyone’s life.
I had stories due in this week.
One was on weird and wonderful places to stay in Scotland. I found some really wacky and unusual accommodation.
Also, I set up an interview with a local filmmaker, Jack Fox. His films have won some awards and he studied at Napier. Also, he is a personal friend. It was a quick interview and transcribing his funny anecdotes didn’t take long. So that was sent away to my Arts and Culture section head.
After all the magazine articles were done and sent away, that was a massive load off my mind. The articles, and the pictures to go with them, had been niggling at the back of my head for two weeks now and it felt unbelievable to have them all finished.
So everything has been go, go, go this week and next week is shaping up to be no different.
My ‘digital platforms’ module calls for an assessment next week, a business plan of what my website, I have to create, has to offer and why it should be ‘commissioned’. Basically, just practice for the real world, so if we need to do it for a job we already know how to do it.
Hopefully, then getting a job when I graduate will be easy as one, two, three!
Lisa-Nicole Mitchell is a third-year BA in Journalism student at Edinburgh Napier University.
