I think for me, the biggest takeaway from this term is knowing when to “pivot.” With the added stressors from Covid-19, working from home, adjusting to remote learning, and the social issues surrounding the US, things haven’t always gone according to plan. As part of that, now more than ever it is incredibly valuable to know how to be flexible. Within the scope of this project, that meant understanding that certain things may take longer than I had previously anticipated and other things may not be possible at all. It also meant that staying organized and being productive during work hours had to be a top priority to get a high quality end product. There were instances where things would be formatted incorrectly and it would take me far longer to fix them than I had thought originally. One example of that comes from the footer at the end of every page. Looking back at it now, it looks incredibly simple, but actually working through how to copy the footer of the original website took more than an hour. I couldn’t figure out how to reformat and center the two different sections and my google searches were coming up empty. I finally found a way to edit the layout and now I actually like how it looks. I think that is the main lesson I have learned throughout this term. Just because there are roadblocks doesn’t mean there isn’t a path forward. Sometimes it’s just a matter of devoting time to working around the issue.

The idea of roadblocks and problem-solving is by no means unique to this project. In fact, I think that patience and perseverance is important in every aspect of my academic and personal life. When I was writing my final paper for one of my courses, I was having quite a bit of trouble finding appropriate research to investigate my thesis. It was a pretty specific topic and so there wasn’t an extensive amount of research done on it. However, I used the same tactics that I have been applying to work to find the sources I needed. I looked at the bigger picture (what my paper was trying to investigate) and then I broke it into its different components. After I broke it up, I found many more sources and much more valuable research to help me investigate the topic. I credit this strategy to the data management planning that we had to do at the beginning of this term. Before I even started building the website, I knew its layout, its content, its design and its purpose. This allowed me to set realistic parameters and plans for what I wanted to accomplish and what I thought was going to take the most time. By having an overarching plan, I was able to stay organized and work more efficiently. It also helped when I came across issues with the design of my website. I was able to save certain modules to the library so that I could use them on future pages as well. For example, I only had to make the “previous” and “next” buttons once, then I saved the module and implemented them on every page after that. That isn’t something that I would have thought to do if I had not had to take the time to really learn the project before I started. The same can be said about taking the time to outline my research paper. Being organized and being flexible are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I think to sum up what I learned this term, being organized allows you to be flexible and being flexible helps you to stay organized.

Image Credit: Votive Slip folio 17 verso 3