Tag: Samantha Danylchuk

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Final Reflection – Samantha Danylchuk

Within the larger body of material, I found in my research from Unit 2, I decided to focus on the generational gap in the workplace because I felt as though this was the most relatable topic for me. After hearing about the different topics brought up by my classmates, this one definitely intrigued me the most because I never considered associating diversity with age until this assignment. To determine what would actually make it into the project, I examined my sources and eliminated the ones that were too difficult to easily work with or held the wrong kind of information for my topic. If the author wasn’t credible or the content was too specific in certain ways where it didn’t focus on my assignment topic how I wanted, I chose not to use those sources. The lessons/skills from the course that I applied in doing this were definitely the TSIS templates. I really enjoyed using the templates to form my own statements and putting my thoughts together in a cohesive, organized way. For example, agreeing with an author on an opinion helped me recognize my own beliefs while finding a work where I countered an idea helped me challenge myself.

I learned that I really do enjoy writing. I absolutely loved the blog format of this class. I have never had experience with this before, and I loved the interactions between classmates because that definitely helped me grow as a student. I will admit that on some posts I was intimidated to share how I felt or bit uncomfortable when we dove into posts that touched upon racial or gender issues because I’m not used to openly discussing these topics. But I’m so thankful I was pushed out of my comfort zone because I definitely think those kinds of discussions will help me with my future classes. I enjoyed commenting on other people’s posts and receiving feedback. I’ve always been a fan of feedback because I’ve always loved hearing other people’s opinions on my work and how I can enhance my own work to make it better. It was difficult for me to acknowledge what I should prioritize and what I should give less of my attention too. I always feel the need to include absolutely every single detail in anything I do, so understanding the bigger picture and summarizing an article for example, are things I could definitely improve on. Talking right to my audience about my research was so unique in itself. It was pleasing to know that not only my teacher is receiving my work, but also other students. I feel like I am taking away so much just from what I’ve learned through my other classmates’ posts and comments, especially because new ideas were brought to me that I would have never thought of before.

This assignment taught me that generalizing information isn’t always the answer. In Unit 1 when this class first began, I definitely think my submissions held less value because generalization became my best friend. As the weeks went on and I got deeper into this class, I think I learned how to directly answer questions with responses that were articulate and detailed. For example, I couldn’t just say “I want to work with this source because it talks about my topic.” I had to explain I wanted to work with it because of the data it contained, the industry within the working generations that it focused on, etc. Additionally, using the “add media” feature on the blog post exposed me to working with unique features that the class layout entailed. I now know more about uploading files, converting pdfs, hyperlinks, etc. which none of my classes required as much last year. I also have never used the SUMMON feature at school last year, so this was extremely helpful in my research and will be sure to remember this going forward in my academic research.

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Final Project – Samantha Danylchuk

The audience for my final project are college students who are about to enter the workforce (for example, Millennials and Gen Z). The purpose of this assignment was to explain and propose advice that these students can take for how to impress their elderly employers and ways to improve the generational gap in the workplace. Basically, I created a series of Facebook posts which are put in a PDF Format so as you take a look, pretend like you’ve just discovered this on social media and are scrolling through each post, which essentially adds up to 6 different posts (but they’re all included in a single profile). The evidence of where I received my information from are cited at the corner of the posts. I wanted a detailed social media post that would both quickly catch the attention of college students while also being informative. I took the feedback I received from my classmates and Professor Oakes to improve from my draft, so I hope you are intrigued!

facebook posts merged pdfs

 

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Discussion Prompt Week of 7/27

similar example of my genre.png

The image above is similar to my genre because this shows an example of an Instagram story posted to social media. While I couldn’t find any Facebook post example templates, I’m creating a similar idea that this story portrays because I want to include a series of posts. This type of writing offers easy-to-read visuals, catching headlines, and big fonts which attract the audience. I believe this sample is very effective, as so many teens and young adults now are consumed by social media. I like how simple and interactive this genre is. While you can’t ask Q+A’s on Facebook like this picture shows, the viewer is still able to react to a message by loving it, liking it, commenting, or sharing. It may be less successful in a way where too many details cannot be shared, so the content is less specific than an article, for example. The lesson I am taking away from this sample in crafting my own project is to create a layout that is fun for the reader! If it’s not interesting to their eyes, it won’t be interesting to read.

 

 

 

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Unit 3 Draft

The audience of my project include college students (mostly juniors and seniors that are present in a job hunt post – graduation). For my genre, I decided to incorporate social media and pretend to do a series of Facebook posts. Because Instagram has brief captions and seems informative, I chose Facebook as my social media platform because less younger kids and teenagers have it where this information would not apply to them, you can share Facebook posts directly to your profile and it will stay pinned there, and most college students are on it a good amount for a variety of reasons. The attached media is a pdf of what would be a series of posts all belonging to a single profile. My purpose and intention with this project layout is to address students who are headed into the workplace with a bunch of different generations, and advise them on what they should know and expect from employers.  This is just my draft so I plan to take feedback I receive to have it updated for the final.

series of facebook posts

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Project Proposal – Samantha Danylchuk

For my unit 3 project, the specific audience I want to write for are the two newest generations, Millennials and Gen Z. The issue I am examining is this conflict between generations in the workplace and my purpose is to guide these two generations about what they should know headed into the workforce. I hope to accomplish a text that provides all the relative information about the current working generations, such as descriptive characteristics, habits, and what needs to be changed among companies to bring employee compatibility success to this environment. I also aim to ease those who are Millennials and Gen Z into having a successful time working with their peers. The argument I want to make is that more action needs to be done within companies and working organizations in order to bridge this generational gap. The type of text I plan to produce is a social media article. Because most Millennials and Gen Z are so used to technology and social media has taken over our lives, I think an article produced by Instagram would catch the attention of these users. I decided to choose a text relating to social media because Instagram is also fairly used as a networking tool aside from LinkedIn, and the Direct Message feature would benefit me. If you’re a Millennial or Gen Z with a job lined up to start in a few weeks, months, etc.  and see that Instagram produced an informative article relating to this issue of how to solve the generational gap in the workplace, I think it would be sent among that user’s friends and so on.

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Discussion week of 7/20 – Samantha Danylchuk

  1. The article I chose to focus on for this week’s prompt is “How To Create a Culture Manifesto for Your Organization (And Why It’s a Good Idea).” The article starts off with the mention of mission statements, and until this read, I always thought mission statements were beneficial for a company. But I agree with the second sentence in that these mission statements focus on external goals and aim to draw the customers in, while not really considering the employees / internal ways of working. One statement that stood out to me in which Mollie West explained Creative Director Sally Clarke said was, “Clarke sums up the company’s culture as “the freedom to ‘keep it weird.’ I think that a company must be authentic and unique for it to be successful, so this saying is definitely an example of turning what they learned at Method’s team and making it actionable for the reader. The article goes on to explain Etsy’s values and principles, and I believe the format of bullet points additionally makes it interactive for the reader to follow the list. By using this writing strategy, the author makes it easy and clear for the reader to understand, especially because at times simplicity is more valuable than being too specific. I believe the target audience here is anyone involved in nonprofits, a social enterprise, or B Corps. This article contains so many great tips and helpful advice that any core team of a company may find useful in attracting its consumers with. Having examples such as in the second to last paragraph with including a list of questions and then having every person come up with a “headline phrase” is extremely effective for this particular audience because it showcases what companies can implement into a daily / weekly routine at work.
  2. For my project proposal, the sort of texts I am basing my work on are those of scholarly sources, websites, and data tables. I am discussing the diversity of the generational gap in the workplace for the purpose that I think this topic will be so beneficial to me in a few years. My readers will have the type of level of detail that explains the characteristics of the generations in the workplace now, but my work will not be too specific where the reader may easily find themselves lost in the material. I plan to take the research I’ve done to focus on topics besides the broader picture, such as professional women and their take on what work-life balance means based off what generation they’re in, the focus on the generational gap in the HR and talent management field, the hospitality industry, etc. I would describe the writing style of my readings to be informative, knowledge-based, and interactive. APA is my citation method, and the types of evidence/sources of my project proposal contains scholarly sources, online articles, and one Ted Talk.
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Discussion Prompt Week of 7/13 – Samantha Danylchuk

  1. My linked article under “biases can infiltrate the process” is about the lack of women in tech. Along with Wynn, other researchers attended several introductory sessions a few years ago at West Coast University, and the observations were astronomical. These sessions provided women with uncomfortable settings, as the females received sexist jokes and imagery, geeky references, and a super competitive environment. Most women were seen setting up the venue with refreshments or raffling off tickets, while the actual presenters happened to be male. If a female engineer was invited by a company, she often did not speak or if she did, would get cut off. Wynn and a research partner Correll described “one session in which men asked 19 questions and women asked none.” This article is extremely valuable as it highlights the gender stereotype within the tech field, specifically among recruiters. For example, the article explains that “presenters often made comments that disparaged women or depicted them as sexualized objects rather than talented technical colleagues.” This Stanford research proves that first are impressions are essential in bringing success to a company, and in order to attract a more diverse workforce, companies must present themselves as diverse communities of professionals, which adds to Wynn’s larger article.
  2. I think “Why Are There Few Women in Tech? Watch a Recruiting Session” would be most beneficial to engineer recruiters of companies in the tech industry who host/attend these sessions. She talks a lot about recruiters and people within tech firms because that’s what the article focuses on, so they are meant to be the target audience. Broad and dramastic change, like having more women in tech, cannot happen through one individual person’s actions. A few sentences from this article that I believe would work well in capturing the point that is being made here for this group of readers is “Wynn says she has presented this research to recruiters and people within tech firms. ‘They’re astonished. They often just don’t know what’s going on in their recruiting sessions,’ she says. Another quote is “The paper also describes recruiters using gender stereotypes. One online gaming company showed a slide of a woman wearing a red, skin-tight dress and holding a burning poker card to represent its product. Another company, which makes software to help construct computer graphics, only showed pictures of men—astronauts, computer technicians, soldiers.” Creating a problem like this one and adding onto a stereotype that’s already existed for so long does not solve anything. Instead, it adds fuel to the fire and promotes this kind of humiliating representation of women in the workforce. Gender stereotypes are used so commonly now without the creators (in this case tech engineers) even recognizing them.
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Research Portfolio – Samantha Danylchuk

Unit 2 Research Reflection 

At the start of this assignment, I had no clue where I was going or what I wanted to do research on. But as I read more into my classmates’ posts, the generational gap in the workplace stood out to me right away. This is something I know I will be experiencing for myself in a few years after I graduate college, so I focused on looking for sources that covered generational diversity in the work environment. As far as the tools and strategies that I used to locate my sources, I spent time going through the helpful links and handouts tabs on our blackboard and searched on Google Scholars, SAGE, EBSCOhost, GALE, and ted.com. Some of my sources go into depth on the different habits of each current generation in the work force and how the conflicts need to be solved, while others focus on the similarities among the generations and what other initiatives that offices or other working environments can implement to bring a more successful atmosphere. Additionally, some include experiments and data tables focusing on a specific career industry while others explain the broader idea.  

I really enjoyed the two note taking techniques I did which included free – writing and organizing a double-entry journal. These two techniques were very different because I felt my thoughts go all over the place when I did a 5-minute free write, but the journal helped me stay organized and on topic. It was really interesting to me how I enjoyed both of them (probably the free-writing a tad more) yet they are completely different approaches at annotating. The research plan has guided my work to search for articles that I think would answer my questions. Having this plan ahead of time really helped me in the whole process of researching because I started typing in keywords that led me to what I was looking for, rather than just any article that would be lacking in information I needed. My plan has begun to evolve based on the data I’ve found, references I’ve read that my sources include, and all the knowledge I have already learned from the entirety of this assignment. Some additional sources I would like to locate are those that challenge my thoughts in some way, making me question and counter the ideas that they demonstrate. I have yet to disagree with anything I’ve found, so this is a gap that I see in my research which I am prioritizing in searching for with my project proposal. 

The idea that one day in the next 5 or 10 years, I could be in a work environment filled with people from all different generations is the most intriguing concept about this topic to me. I’ve already had professors of all different ages in just one year at SU, so to think that my topic is even happening around me is so exciting! For a club I belong to at school called The Women’s Network, we visited the headquarters of Bloomberg in New York City early last year, and I spoke to a recent graduate of SU who is working in finance there now and she explained to me how most of her colleagues are older men so she was extremely intimidated when she began her job at first. To actually know of experiences and see my topic be exemplified in the real working world is super intriguing and I can’t wait to go further with my research on this! 

Annotations

Complicating Your Research Exercise

Focusing Flowchart

Rounding Out The Conversation

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Discussion Posts Week of 7/6

  1. An article that I want to add to my research portfolio is titled “Work-Life Balance: The Generational Divide.” Authors Kathleen M. Nelville and Kelly Brochu go on to explain the four different generations at work which are Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Generation Xers, and Millennials. They performed a study to determine whether there are fundamental differences in how student affairs professionals interpret the meaning of the work, and the study focused on those in the Northeast region of the United States. Their study proved that all 4 of the generations define the terms “work ethic,” “professionalism,” and “work-life balance” differently. In conclusion of this study, the two authors of the article noted that professionals on student college campuses need to be opened to the assessment and ongoing evaluation of policies and structures of departments within student affairs.

I believe this source will be useful to me because of its focus on student affairs professionals and the need for change on college campuses. It also just so happens that this study was based off of schools in the Northeast region of the United States, and while the article does not state any specific university, it’s a coincidence that SU is in the same region the two authors talk about. This is one of my few sources with an actual study and a table, so I think finding a source with this approach will be beneficial to my research as well. While I have other sources that go into depth on these 4 generations working together, none of them center of student affairs professionals which as a current college student, is a topic I am very interested in and so happy I came across this source.

2. One response I would like to choose is Lauren T’s response. She builds upon the ideas in the original article by continuing to discuss sexism in an open office atmosphere. She extends the conversation, though, beyond that by discussing how her particular office was designed by a female and that the office itself is wonderful. What she says to justify her point that the actual environment is not offensive or degrading to women, and that it’s the “entitled, sexist men being unwilling to evaluate their own behavior and how it impacts their women colleagues” is where Lauren opens up a new line of inquiry.  In Lauren’s last paragraph, she explains that it’s not the fault of the open office space as these kind of things happen commonly in gyms, transportation systems, and the street, which intrigued me because in a way she sort of contradicts the blame of an open office and she illustrates the idea that sexism exists everywhere else too.

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Research Plan

I chose to focus my research on generational diversity in the workplace. A classmate introduced this topic to the blog and I was immediately intrigued because I feel as though working with others who come from different generations as me will be a challenge I could potentially face in the near future. I have watched several TedTalks now and read several articles about bridging this gap in the workplace and have concluded that the questions guiding my research are: What are the implications of generational diversities in the workplace? How can we manage these conflicts into becoming a successful, multigenerational workforce? How is generational diversity a competitive advantage in a working environment? I want to use this research to understand how others must respect and listen to those who have different perspectives of them while still working efficiently together, especially because growing up in completely times leads to having different outlooks on how to live one’s life. 

I want to understand the questions italicized above because the career I plan on going towards is advertising. With advertising, there is no doubt that I have already heard from my professors how much group work there is over individual work, so I am expecting to be working with people of all ages after post-graduation when I find my first job. Not only would I be working with people of different generations, but depending on my position I could also be presenting my ideas and having clients who come from a different generation as me. I want to know these answers to not only better myself as an employee, but make those around me feel just as professional when working with me regardless of my age. 

I believe that my professional, internship, and organizational coursework inform the inquiry because even in my current summer job, I have noticed the lack of ability to overcome this generational gap. I work at a local smoothie shop, and the staff is all high school and college students. Some days it gets very disorganized and we’ll be short on staff, or not have enough ingredients, etc. because I feel like our manager and owner, who are Millennials, don’t know how to properly communicate. This is a current example in my life of why I want to explore this topic more; the fact that I don’t even have a professional job yet and I already see conflicts between Gen Z and Millennials happening in such a casual work environment honestly blows my mind so I can only imagine what I will experience in the actual working world. Because of this research assignment, I will be expanding my knowledge on an issue that I will soon be confronted with after my time at SU and into the world of advertising. The fields that matter most to my inquiry are scholarly articles from several SU databases and professional websites such as Forbes.com which I have already gained a few sources from. I think having the contrast of scholarly databases and casual yet academic websites really feeds me detailed information that is also not too difficult to search for.