As my senior year rapidly continues to pass, I’ve looked back at several things from my college career that have helped me understand who I am and how I learn.

A big factor for me is my learning environment. I have not done as well in classes that are massive lecture halls, but have tended to excel in a smaller classroom where the lesson is more discussion based and there is an active engagement with the professor rather than a passive relationship between the professor and myself.

I think this is why I’ve loved my time in the UNC Journalism and Mass Communication school’s advertising and public relations courses. I constantly feel engaged with the material and am interested in coming to class every day.

In regards to this, I was really struck by a concept development technique that I participated in the other day for my Advertising Workroom course.

In this panorama you can see that, while brainstorming for a brand identity, we were instructed to use multicolored post-it notes to write down our ideas and place them on the wall. The system seems very haphazard but I was amazed how the physical action of placing an idea on the wall allowed me to mentally register it and then move on to a different concept. I didn’t feel like I was constantly riffing off my most recent idea. I was also able to move around the room, and be further influenced by the ideas that other students had posted.

I really believe that this brainstorming technique helps your mind open up and become more efficient. In fact, I would expect that many more office spaces begin to feature this style of collaborative idea generation using products like IdeaPaint that turn walls into giant whiteboards.

Image via http://www.ideapaint.com/spaces/work/

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Personal achievement this past week: I completed the +HWY 55 Burgers Shakes & Fries (Formerly Andy’s) Big “A” Challenge.

My friend and I do an eating challenge for his birthday and last year was El Gigante (4lb Burrito) at Bandidos in Chapel Hill. It got the better of me in the end, but he was able to defeat it.

This year I was better prepared and we took on the Hwy 55 Big “A” Challenge. Needless to say, it was an immense trial. I overcame it though in a scant 16:30.

Unfortunately, my friend did not so now we’re tied 1-1. Until next year!

Profound quote from Elton E. Mackin’s WWI memoir:

“Little crosses stand above the dead. They do not tell how men died; they hide the bitter human stories of the war. […] They seldom stand alone. Men see to that.”

My girlfriend hates my phone.

She is very vocal about the fact that I check it constantly, and she doesn’t see the need for me to be on it. I think my phone is amazing. It connects me to others from around the world, allows me to increase my productivity, and is a multi-use device. My phone is an instant portal to the entire collective knowledge of mankind! 
 
And hilarious cat photos…

So when my phone died last month I was distraught. I couldn’t sleep at night, I had cold sweats, and I could barely eat anything. 

It wasn’t that serious but I legitimately did feel mentally distressed at not having a phone. I soon realized how integrated it had become in my life. My biggest loss was my contacts. I had failed to properly sync all my contacts so when it loaded back up I had lost almost a year’s worth of contact information. The ease of which I had access to all my contact information had made me complacent. I realized that I had never memorized the numbers that I contacted most. These people weren’t a phone number to me, they were a name and a photo in my phone. Needless to say it has been a lesson learned the hard way.

I have a new phone now though; a Samsung Galaxy SIII. I’ve been amazed by some of the things this phone can do. The one feature that has really stood out to me though is a simple, yet key, addition. 
That feature is the LED indicator.

It’s very satisfying to know that a simple feature addition to my phone like this has allowed me to feel like I’m no longer attached at the hip.

I went and saw the movie Looper when it came out in theaters and really enjoyed it. I’m a fan of sci-fi movies and I thought the movie was an excellent twist on the time travel genre.

I was really excited to see a couple days afterwards that the writer/director (Rian Johnson) had released an in-theater commentary track for the movie. The track is more than a description of the action on screen, but is akin to a director’s commentary you would find on a DVD/Blu-Ray release of the movie. Except that it’s free! (And available on SoundCloud for download here)

Now the obvious incentive for releasing a track like this is that you can’t listen to it on the first showing. So, you have to come back for a second time and the studio gets more money. For a movie that I enjoyed though, I wouldn’t be upset about it. A movie such as Looper is a perfect example of one that really requires a second viewing. The concept of the film is very intellectual and it’s easy to get caught up on the visuals or the plot line and to miss the finesse that the director has placed in the film.

Unfortunately for me, I never got around to going back to the theater to listen to the commentary with the movie. So, I decided it would still be worth my time to rent the movie when it came out and listen to the track. After doing that tonight, I’m even more disappointed that I wasn’t able to experience this on the big screen. The commentary was immensely enlightening and really gave me an appreciation for the smaller details in the background, the lighting, and the actors’ abilities. 

I would really love to see this type of free commentary occur with more movies. I know personally I would go to second showings of a movie I enjoyed if director commentary was provided ahead of DVD release. For example: I would have loved this type of experience with The Hobbit.

If you haven’t seen Looper yet it’s out on DVD/Blu-Ray now and well worth the rent. The director commentary is available here: Looper Theatrical Commentary