Undergraduate students in all majors within Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences (IAS) focus
on five core learning objectives:
Collaboration and Shared Leadership
Critical and Creative Thinking
Diversity and Equity
Interdisciplinary Research and Inquiry
Writing and Communication
Collaboration and Shared Leadership
Collaboration and Shared Leadership means simulating a real team environment in order to accurately
represent what work in a career setting looks like. Different members are always in charge of
different teams or different assignments, and the role of team manager rotates in order to demonstrate
to each person what it means to lead. Organization, communication, and a clear sense of direction are
the main components of my learning of this aspect.
Rao, A. Ermolenko, M. Nguyen, T. Winter, 2023. Game Engine Development Final.
This final project had us implement unique functionality within a Javascript OpenGL shader. Our project
was to take the prior knowledge within the class, and use it to create a tile-based map editor with its
own set of coordinates. I created the initial diagrams that would describe and guide my team to design
and create our engine functionality, alongside coding my necessary files.
Rao, A. Dillon, A. Singh, S. Atendido, M.J. Vedmed, D. Gorantla, V. Qiu, E. Zhang, F. Dasgupta, K.
Autumn, 2023. Product Development Lab Pitch-Deck.
For the Product Development Lab, my team was tasked with creating a formal prototype for a
professional client. We worked on creating our prototype using industry tools like Bubble, as well as
creating a pitch-deck to propose to the client. I was one of the team leads during this project, as
our team was large and needed to handle multiple tasks at once.
Global Media Lab Students, Royon, B. Spring, 2022. Pre-Production and Production Crew for Short Film UNTWINED.
With the Global Media Lab, I worked as crew for the short film UNTWINED, which we had produced with
professional dance artist Bennyroyce Royon. During pre-production, I was tasked with working on Hair
and Makeup, as well as working with the Art Department in order to create our final costume design for
our on-camera talent.
Critical and creative thinking
Critical and creative thinking is all about taking what’s available to us, be it research or resources,
and deriving something new from it. In the case of critical thinking, being able to find common threads
between vastly different works of literature, or working out new research to an already existing topic
represents that line of thought. Creative thinking is being able to take already-existing materials, and
working with them to create something entirely new. This was particularly present in art courses, where I
worked to create a film set using collage materials, or in courses that require me to create a culminating
final project that demonstrates my ability throughout the course, like a unique design for software.
Global Media Lab Students, Royon, B. Spring, 2022. Music Score for Short Film UNTWINED.
A part of working on UNTWINED that heavily involved my own Critical and Creative thinking was the
post-production phase. During this time, I was responsible for writing and recording the original music
score for the short film. This process required me to think beyond the idea of just normally writing music,
and instead taught me to think of film score as “music as sound effect.”
I was the lead guitarist with my band, Here’s 2 HOPE, during a performance at The Vera Project in Seattle,
as one of many acts during a special event with the UW Songwriter’s Circle. I worked on writing parts for
myself and our other guitarist for the songs we were performing at the show, and was one of my first experiences
with writing a song to completion.
I was one of four people working on a design proposal document for a web extension tool for Canvas, where
students using the browser extension could access a repository unique to their Canvas account. I designed
documents and had to use creative and critical thinking in order to compare artifacts and diagrams between
the four of us and proofread them to make sure they all fit the specifications of our design.
Diversity and equity
Understanding the different views that people bring to a conversation is an important part of working in
a career environment. That’s why Diversity and Equity training is important. Multiple courses involved
working with teams, and understanding the places from which a team member’s perspective comes from is the
single-most important thing about engaging with team members, especially when it comes to difficult topics,
which are sometimes unavoidable.
Global Media Lab Students, Richardson, K. Spring, 2022. On-Camera Suit Actor for short film On The Other Side.
In addition to my work on Untwined, I worked on the set of On The Other Side as an illustrator for the set
designers, but also as a costume actor. My work with the Global Media Lab and Kellie Richardson was artwork
that was especially focused on themes of equity and diversity, as many of Kellie’s artwork is centered
around Black Healing from generational and historic trauma.
In this class, I worked with three other students in order to practice forms of management with them.
We each took turns in the rotating role of team manager, and led our team through our assignments. Diversity
was a huge part of this class, as it required our teams to be comprised of different identities so that we
would be able to work with many different perspectives.
Interdisciplinary research and inquiry
The culmination of different fields to form one product is the heart of Interdisciplinary Research. If
someone wants to direct a video game, they need an understanding of everything from software design,
game economics/theory, artistic vision, and a multitude of other skills in order to convey their product
properly. Interdisciplinary forms of study encourage a broad scope of skills that can translate into real
world use, and instead of when specialized educations only prepare someone for a single path, would be
applicable to many fields of work.
Rao, A. Dillon, A. Singh, S. Atendido, M.J. Vedmed, D. Gorantla, V. Qiu, E. Zhang, F. Dasgupta, K.
Autumn, 2023. Product Development Lab Pitch-Deck.
For the product development lab’s prototype development, I worked on the team creating our prototype.
Because of this position, I had to apply knowledge from all sorts of kinds of fields, including visual
aspects like UI design, Color theory, and software aspects that would enable us to make our prototype functional.
In the Software Engineering Lab, I was to work on adding functionality to an existing software. Working in Agile with
software management tools like Azure DevOps required a large amount of research, a lot more so than the actual
programming part of the course. Instead, we appropriated source code within our system in order to match the results of our research.
Writing and communication
Writing and Communication are the most fundamental part of working with others. Either the correct documentation needs
to be available to team members, someone needs an email sent to a client as fast as possible, or you will need to conduct
training to get new employees up to speed on a project. These skills are invaluable for productivity, as writing and
communicating properly is what drives decisions forward within a work environment.
This course’s entire purpose was to properly teach students to write different documents properly. In this course,
communication modes were explored deeply, when it came to writing different kinds of letters or documentation for the workplace.
For the Analysis and Design final, we were tasked with putting all of the skills we learned into one comprehensive
document that told the narrative accurately of the software design we planned to propose. We learned the differences
in artifact and diagram types, and learned how to put them together to explain the needs that our software design would solve.