My Journey – Jaydon Anderson’s ePortfolio

Your “My Journey” page is a chance for you to talk about how every aspect of your experience as a student at SIUE is informing who you are.

Your “My Journey” page should tell a story using artifacts that are records of your work and achievement. That might be something you did in a class, like a paper, video, or group project. Or it might be something you did outside the classroom – a club you participated in, an organization you collaborated with, a team you played on. Your achievements don’t just happen in the classroom!

Put those artifacts in context. What did you gain or learn from the experience of producing that artifact? How did you feel about the activity before, during, and after you did it? How does it fit in with your goals, values, and/or priorities? Reflection is a crucial part of the learning process

You should use digital storytelling to take those individual artifacts and reflections and puts them together into a story of your growth and your identity. What do those artifacts tell you and tell your audience about who you are, what you value, and what you’re capable of? That can feel like a weighty task, but the “my journey” page is something you can come back to and update or revise at any time. We constantly grow and change, and so will this page.

I would like to start this page by talking about a project that I’m learning about call Vitendo 4 Africa. This is project that has existed for a few years now, and what they are doing is providing resources to immigrants from Africa who live within the St. Louis area. They have truly made an impact, and we are going to be meeting with those are stakeholders within the project. In class on 9/2/2026, I worked in a group with 3 others in order to identify questions that would be essential when it comes to learning about those who work with V4A. Here is a screenshot of the questions we created in our group that are designed to learn more from those who we will meet during our first site visit on 9/9/2026:

In Codes 121, I did a 5-minute timed write of my thoughts on a short story we read as an assignment. The story was called, “Letting the Right One In” from A Phoenix First Must Burn. This timed write was meant to exercise our writing ability, but it was also meant to show that I can form my own view about a story. Here is an image of what I wrote during my timed write:

On 9/4/2026, I read a short story called “The Hookah Lounge”. At first, I was unsure of what the contents would be. I thought it would be about smoking, and possibly a specific Hookah lounge location. To an extent, it was. There was much more feeling and emotion that went into it than most readers would see though. The use of the photos scattered throughout the text displayed the true meaning of the Hookah lounges for the Arab community. It’s their way of sharing a space together, and smoking the hookah is actually something that they looked forward to in their lives. This is different from American culture in a way that makes it seem that good things can come out of smoking. For many, that is their reality, and we have to learn that it’s okay to see something that is different from what we are accustomed to and accept the lifestyles of others. In CODES 121, I did a timed write about the Hookah Lounge. Here’s how I wrote:

I was given the opportunity to go to V4A’s establishment in order to learn more about the business. Not only did I learn more about what they do and why they do it, but the areas in which us CODES students can step in and help were clearly identified. I took some notes during the visit that hd to do with the topics that were being communicated. My main takeaway from this visit, is that us CODES students have been given an amazing opportunity to make an impact in our community by acquiring the knowledge that we need in order to make this partnership meaningful. I’m genuinely ecstatic to see where this can go:

On September 15, I did a time management reflection in order to see where I’m at as a whole. I found the way that I spend my time eye-opening. I utilize my time much more efficiently than I had thought before I was given this assignment to do. The benefit in this reflection is that now I have identified the areas where I could be more efficient as well, only reducing my wasted time in my life. I think this assignment was amazing because it’s not very often that I take the time to evaluate every single hour of my day. Here is what that assignment looked like for me: