Hi all,
Hope you’re off to a wonderful week. A few important announcements:Â
Please fill out this very short mentorship questionnaire, ASAP (by tomorrow, pretty please 🙏!). I have initial ideas for matches for each of you, but want to consider your input. The sooner you do this, the sooner I can reach out to potential matches! You may notice that there is an option to waive 1-1 mentorship – feel free to discuss this option with me if you’re inclined to pursue that option. Also to note: I’m adjusting the schedule such that your mentorship can carry through mid-summer, so that should ease up some of the time-crunch of getting all 3 meetings in before May.Â
Tonight’s event has been postponed until March 21. Apologies, there was a time conflict! There will still be a resident-led peer-session (at 8pm ET), which I encourage you to go to. You can even use the time together to co-watch and discuss some wonderful past ITP thesis presentations for inspiration.
“What should I be doing now”? At this point, you should have begun with some sort of making practice: that might be exploratory low-fi prototyping, sketches, creating technical pipelines to iterate with. I’d hope at this point, you’ve had 2-3 meetings with me, 2-3 meetings with a peer group, and one meeting with a resident whose thesis presentation resonated with you. You should have watched a few thesis presentations from the archives (some selected on the Project Guidelines, all archives linked on the Thesis Resources page). You should continue research and maybe even continue refining your thesis question. You should be documenting absolutely everything! (preferably on the Thesis Journal!). In fact, I highly recommend that youÂ
Post something you made (a sketch, a styleframe, a video, an image, a sound, a meme) on the thesis journal this week, and comment on someone else’s! If you keep up your work, little by little, you’ll be in great shape by the end of the semester!
Your next big milestones are a draft production schedule and a rough testable prototype of some sort, both of which we’ll review in class March 28. You can talk about either thing with me in a 1-1.Â
Hot tip: for those of you still quite unsure about your project’s “form”: consider that you will also be taking classes in the next seven weeks and during the summer. If your thesis question is juicy enough, it is likely you can use assignments in your next courses to make a project aligned with your thesis work.Â
That’s all for now! Let me know if you have any questions, thoughts, ideas, brainstorms, or … songs stuck in your head you want to share!
Warmly,Â
SarahÂ