This semester I’ve been taking a photography class that has by far been the best class I’ve taken at Ohio State so far. While it started as a class where I had to follow prompts in order to learn how to use my camera, it transitioned into a class where I was able to see my own creativity and base projects around my own ideas. One of my more recent projects was recreating famous portraits from an artist that inspired me. I chose to base my work around Cindy Sherman and I dressed my friends up in different clothes and makeup and was able to try my best at recreating some of her most famous shots. I found this project to be extremely fun and inspiring. I was able to have so much fun with my roommates as we spent time recreating these shots and I was able to learn more about the inspiration behind Sherman’s shots. She would dress up as different women icons in society and would use those photos to reflect how society looks at women differently depending on their roles. I really enjoyed being able to take the knowledge and experience I learned from Cindy Sherman and apply it to my own style of photography. Below are some of my best shots from the project.

Last May-June, I went on my high school’s three week senior trip to Israel. This trip with my classmates was the most meaningful and important trip I have ever taken. While it was special and fun to be able to travel with my closest friends, it was also extremely educational and helped shape me as a person. While on this trip, we visited places around Israel of all different cultures and religions. While I went to a Jewish high school, we visited not only Jewish areas, but also Christian, Muslim, Druze, Bahai, and Bedouin sites.

There, we learned about everything about these cultures from history, to practices and even food within the culture. It was a really eye opening experience to learn about so many religions and culture, especially those that I hadn’t learned about or even heard of before. This experience took me out of my small bubble that I had all throughout school, being surrounded be people who shared the same religion and culture as I did. This experience allowed me to appreciate our differences with other people in the world and taught me to to keep an open mind when learning and meeting people who may do things differently than I do.

I also believe that this was an extremely important experience to have before going off to a big school like Ohio State. Like I previously stated, I was kept in a small bubble most of my life, and did not know much about other cultures. However, after this trip, I felt prepared to go out of my bubble and learn about even more people’s religions and cultures that I would meet at Ohio State.

This past month, I had an art project in my beginners drawing class where we had to recreate an artist’s drawing and we’re graded on how close our drawing is to the original artist’s. At first, I didn’t expect it to be that difficult because I have copied drawings before. However, as I was working on it more and more, it wasn’t turning out the way I would have liked. The lines weren’t looking the same, the shading was off and just everything about it looked wrong. I have always been a perfectionist my whole life, so I knew that I was not going to turn in this drawing until it looked right, until it looked perfect.

However, as I was about to turn in my project and I was finally happy with it, my professor came around and told me that everything I had done was wrong. This was really difficult for me to hear. I had been working on this project for almost three weeks and as far as I could tell, it looked perfect. My professor continued by saying that the reason that it was all wrong was because my picture that I was supposed to be copying was meant to be the opposite of perfect. The artist, Maurice Sendak, had purposely drawn his drawing with broken lines and messy sketches and shading. My professor then sat down at my drawing with a dark pencil and proceeded to break up all of my lines that I had worked so hard to make perfect. He added scribbles and random lines all around. It was really difficult to watch. It got even worse when he then made me sit down and continue adding random dark broken and uneven lines all over my picture.

While in the end, my picture looked much better overall, “messing up” my picture with these random and dark lines all over the place were very hard to draw. The perfectionist inside of me was screaming as I drew lines coming and going in all different directions. However, I think that working on this project helped me understand that not every project or assignment that I work on throughout college is going to be perfect. In fact, most of my projects and assignments may turn out to be completely wrong. Maybe even this one. The point is that while I’m working in classes and on different assignments, I need to not hang onto this idea of being perfect. While I can work my hardest and try my best on my assignments, I can’t hold myself to a certain standard that in the back of my head I know I’ll never reach. In the end, whether it’s perfect or not, as long as it is my hard work, I’m sure to be happy with it.