Category: 320 Reflections

My individual project for this semester is going to be complicated when it comes to ensuring that it benefits both groups that I am attempting to reach. As stated in the first reflection, my product is going to consist of two smaller products, one for Heartlands and one for professors at SIUE. The way that I see it, each of my products is going to be a reflection of the other one. For the first product, the focus will be professors at SIUE, while the audience that I will be attempting to reach out to is Heartlands, and the second product will focus on Heartlands in an attempt to reach out to professors at SIUE. With that being the case, both Heartlands and the professors at SIUE will be the primary stakeholders in my project. I will need to ensure that my work can best communicate the benefits of one stakeholder to the other. 

Heartlands will play the most important role in this project. Since information on Heartlands and their projects is not as easily accessible as the work that professors do at SIUE, I will need to go to Heartlands directly to get the most accurate information. On top of that, I will need to know what information Heartlands needs from the professors in order to initiate a collaboration with them in the future. In my initial draft of my product to Heartlands, I included information like the specific courses they are teaching this semester and a description of these courses. However, Heartlands might also want to know things such as the professor’s history at SIUE or their specific contact information. On the other hand, working with professors at SIUE should be relatively simple. If I need specific information, I could always create another survey for the same professors or even reach out to the Department Chairs to avoid sending out over 30 emails. 

Finally, after three semesters of building towards the implementation of a product for our community partners, this semester is the one we have all been waiting for. Just last year, I finalized my “product” in the Research Teams class, which consisted of two smaller products, one for professors at SIUE and one for Heartlands Conservancy. For the professors, I created a document that showcased what exactly Heartlands is and what they do for their community. The information I provided was solely based on what I knew from my experience with them or what I could find online. However, this may not be the way that Heartlands wishes to portray itself to professors at SIUE. In order to ensure that I display Heartlands to my list of professors in the best light, I believe that it is crucial for me to speak with people from Heartlands on how they would like to be portrayed to students and professors on campus. 

For the second part of my product, I created a list of professors at SIUE who teach science, ecology, or environmental science courses. I also included the individual courses that they are teaching this semester, a description of those courses, and the chairs of each professor’s department. Unfortunately, I feel like there is some more information that I could include in this portion of the product in order to give Heartlands an idea of which professors would most benefit from a collaboration. All in all, my work throughout this semester is going to involve going back in forth between two groups, SIUE professors and Heartlands, in order to determine what would be best for forming a connection between both of them. I have a long way to go, but I already have an outline for what I want to accomplish, so I know this last part will not be too difficult.