Hello,

 

My name is Toli Begum and I am a student at Bronx Bridges High School. I have learned so many things this semester in New Media Arts Workshop including how to edit photos with Adobe Photoshop, edit video with Adobe Premiere Pro, website design, and digital camera basics. Designing my own website was a long process of all the things that we have done. This is because creating a well organized website with enough information takes both time and effort. However, web design was something I have always wanted to do but  the lack of confidence stopped me from doing it. I often thought only professional people are able to own a website, not an individual like me. Having joined EVC’s New Media Arts workshop, I have discovered tons of countless things that most youth would wish to learn.

 

To create my own website, I had to keep myself on track of gathering reflections and material for my portfolio. I was pretty excited on completing all the work because there wasn't anything so boring. Every day we learned something new. Another most amazing part of this course was learning about public speaking, I always wanted to learn about it because this was also something I love to do even though I wasn't good at it.

 

As a group, our main goal was to address a social justice issue that we as young people experience and are very concerned about addressing. We decided to explore the roots of violence in humans and the media, and how it affects youth. We created a group website with documentary remix (mixing archival documentary footage with new material that we captured) to help us succeed. Our group members created the logo, the remix and the designs. Even though it was stressful for us to create two websites -- our  individual website and a group website, we managed to work hard on everything because addressing the issue was most important of all.

 

As Steve Jobs said, dots connect only when you look backward. It was actually worth it waking up early in the summer vacation mornings to attend this program, I have learned so many skills with a direct experience that will be used through my life. Indeed, this program actually inspires me to grow more. I had joined a girls initiative program while being in school last year to address some social problems faced by young girls. Many times in our environment we (Hijabi) experience lots of disrespect from our peers. A hijab is a veil worn by some Muslim women in the presence of any male outside of their immediate family and the one who wears it is a Hijabi. We always find our classmates and other people thinking that hijab is a burden and weakness of our soul. We have decided to address this problem with some sort of creative ideas.

 

However, we could not go ahead for the reason that regents exams were at our door. Many times I was busy preparing for the regents and other exams that I failed to think about the issues Muslim women face until now. This workshop has inspired me to come up with a creative idea of creating a video explaining what is hijab and how we Hijabi see it. If I had not attended EVC's New Media Arts Workshop I would probably drop out of that girls initiative program. I was meant to attend this program to complete the mission of addressing the hijab issue for muslim women and myself.

 

 

 

Sincerely,

    Toli begum