The project is a multimedia timeline about my career change, from international development to instructional design and educational technology. Using TimelineJS, I developed the project as a tool to reflect on the academic and career management steps I took and to identify other factors at play as I underwent career transition.
I could have written a more straightforward reflection, but certain elements might get overlooked in the process, such as political decisions and events and the Covid-19 pandemic. These seemingly tangential factors are interspersed in the timeline as “social” threads, and highlighted using striking background colors, including red for Covid-19 and blue for political events associated with the US elections, to differentiate them from the main thread of the job search. These events shaped the decisions I made while a student, and the professional profile I built when the time came to search for and apply to jobs. The administration’s decision to use international students as pawns to potentially force universities to open and allow in-person learning reminded me of my precarious situation. I started applying for jobs early in my final semester, as both a career management strategy and a reaction to the political uncertainty. Meanwhile, Covid-19 made me forgo my plans to look for an external internship, and provided an impetus for my passion for online learning as can be gleaned from the papers I wrote and projects I pursued.
With the timeline’s visual format, one can also observe how the latter part of my third and final semester was full of “events.” This can help students looking to line up jobs by graduation to plan both their academic workload and the timing of their job search accordingly. Despite only taking one elective and a studio class, I had to juggle working at CNDLS, sending out applications, and preparing for and Zooming in to interviews.
The app allows embedding different types of media for a more engaging experience, yet it could be improved by allowing the integration of ambient sound that plays in the background to set the mood of an “event.” As a storytelling tool, the timeline provides a clear beginning, middle, and end with a customizable and user-friendly backend interface using Google Sheets. TimelineJS was developed by Knight Lab, and is available as a WordPress plugin.
