July/20/2025

6th Semester Review

So I finished my 6th semester of university a month ago! I have just been enjoying my summer break and I thought i would write my thoughts about my 6th semester! Just for context Im studying to become a multimedia designer, which is like a graphical designer but with more stuff. Like video editing, photography, photo editing, traditional art and digital art, etc. For more context I currently live in Mexico. I wasn't born here, I moved here in 2016 from the USA due to personal family reasons. So Spanish is my second language that I learned and is also the reason why the pictures may contain Spanish!


So I actually all most liked all my classes for this semester which were:

  • a GUI and UX design class
  • a sound editing and mixing class
  • an advertising class
  • Web Design II
  • an animation class
  • a web maintenance class

I’ll just get it out of the way, my least favorite class was the web maintenance one. I didn't really like this class because I honestly learn nothing about maintaining a web page. The class was more about how to launch a website. So ya, my least favorite class of the semester.


A class I enjoyed a lot but was a huge disappointment for me was my Web Design II class. I honestly think the professor teaches the material very good, which in this case is html and css. It was my favorite class last semester but this semester?? I'm mainly disappointed cause the professor missed a lot of classes. On the 3rd term (each semester has 3 terms in my school, each lasting about a month.) we literally only saw him one time, before the exam. We were gonna learn javascript, but due to his absence we only learned a bit of it.


For the sound editing and advertising class, I found them average. I didn’t hate them nor like them a lot but i still found them pretty cool. In the sound editing class I learned how to edit audio, mainly editing a voice, how to clean it up, how to pitch it higher, stuff like that. Also mix music with a voice, like just making sure the music doesn’t overpower the voice.


As for my advertising class, I learned how to make different types of campaigns and there purpose, like propaganda which is to promote an idea or ideals and influence the public opinion. or a social campaign which is more to promote a specific message to the public. We even learned how to advertise a brand and a product of that brand! Then at the end of the semester our professor had us print it in a in form of a book/magazine!! Here is a picture of my favorite one, which was the social campaign. We had to choose a brand then with that brand promote a message with a social campaign with its own logo. I chose Ciel, a water bottle company, then I named the campaign Ola de Cambio. Which in translates to Wave of Change in English. Its about keeping the ocean clean. The texts translates to: Each wave matters, Each action is important.



I found the GUI and UX design class very interesting!! It was probably the most difficult class for me, as it had a lot of theory. I’m not so good with theoretical classes as I like a more hands on approach, being in Spanish made it much harder for me, I honestly get scared when I see like a huge wall of text in Spanish. Luckily I have learn enough Spanish to be able to translate my notes to English without much trouble. GUI stands for Graphical User Interface. Its pretty much a visual way for the user to navigate a program or device, like say Windows or Macos, they have a GUI to navigate the whole operating system of a computer! While UX stands for User Experience. UX is often used as the name implies, the user experience and their satisfaction with it. Basically it focus on a user needs and how they behave in order to make a satisfying product or service for them. I even learn something new that I didn’t even knew existed, NUI which means Natural User Interface. NUI refers how a user can naturally interact with a device or program. For example gestures, touch or our voice, most obvious example is our smartphones with touch screens.


For our final project of this class we had to make an app prototype with Figma that we had to present. Figma basically allows you to design the whole GUI of an app or website before you actually code it. I chose to make an app that teaches you not only to cook, but specifically Mexican dishes, that I named Don Chef. Here is a screenshot of it!!! My professor told that it was overall good. He said that I should add words to bottom to clarify what each icon means. which in the screen are recipes, home page and groceries. He also said to add a little note on what each interaction does or do if its something I cant do in Figma.



Finally, my favorite class of the semester was my animation class! It was more about animating effects and elements rather than animating characters, which kinda disappointed me but I still had so much fun in this! We used adobe after effects to do our animations. We went from simply rotating and sliding objects to bouncy text! One of my favorite effects I learned was how to make a line appear and disappear a few seconds after, hope you can understand what I mean, I don’t know how to explain it well. The same technique is used to animate outlines of text or an image. One really cool thing I leaned is about masks, which makes things only appear when they are inside of the selected area of the mask!! But my most favorite thing about the class?? When we started fooling around with the camera position and a bit of 3d stuff!! I found it so much fun moving the camera! We also learned a bit about adding lighting in the videos! One of my favorite things we did was make a cool depth effect video with just a 2d image!! We did this by firstly layering an illustration of a setting in photoshop, then in After effects we converted a some layers into 3d objects. Which allowed us to to position the layers father away or closer away from the camera. Finally with the camera we changed the aperture setting and zoomed in the camera, blurring the illustration. So that when we zoomed out the camera, it would unblur the illustration, creating a depth effect. I think ima have a animation class II next semester so I can’t wait!


Overall, I really enjoyed this semester, most classes were fun and interesting for me!!! Probably my favorite semester I had so far!! I heard that eventually ima learn 3d modeling so I cant wait for that, that sounds so exciting and cool to me! I now completed six out of nine semesters, Im almost graduating!! I’m honestly kinda of scared of what will happen after, like will I be able to find a job?? Can’t do nothing but just accept it and go with the flow, I will know what happens when its the right time.