Becoming Me

Becoming Me endeavors to showcase the value of college as a time of self-improvement, discovery and growth. That looks different in the lives of students, but whether students attend University simply because it is the thing to do or because they want to follow a dream, we all come here and leave as different people. 

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Becoming Me is the culmination of my time at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA). The project is my thesis for the UAA Honors Program and serves as the capstone project for my Bachelors of Arts in Journalism and Public Communications program.

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This series is part of a larger research project, funded and supported by the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarship, titled Finding the Pulse of UAA: A Multimedia Project." The goal of this research project is to address a question in the minds of many prospective and current UAA students, "What is UAA's culture?" 

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Attending a commuter campus like UAA with a large non-traditional student population, I thought for a long time that UAA didn't have a unifying campus culture. But through the course of this project and speaking to different students about what time here has meant for them it became apparent that there is a culture of self-improvement at UAA. This is a place where students come to grow into themselves, not only through education but also experiences, challenges and introspection.

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That culture of self-improvement may not make this campus stand out from others, but just as the students here are different from those on other campuses, the nature of that self-improvement and its manifestation in the lives of students here will be unique. Because each of us grows in our own way, I have chosen four students to showcase that self-improvement and represent its presence on our campus. Each has a different background, different interests and different dreams. All of them are becoming more of who they want to be while attending UAA. 

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Project elements were captured almost solely using an iPhone. Some photos were contributed by the interviewees, some other photos were taken from their social media accounts with the permission of the interviewees. All recorded audio is original.