Alexandra Pirkle, Texas A&m University - Commerce, authentic student portrait

I was always very interested in creating stories and how to articulate them. Once I was exposed the possibility of expressing those ideas and expressing those narratives visually, it kind of blew my mind, and it's always challenging, it's always different. And some would argue this, but there's no standard of how to make a movie. I can come at it from however I want and that's really interesting. Last spring, I was really interested in looking at how children's animated films function very differently from adult animated films, as well as, adult live action films, and there really wasn't a class that can facilitate that. So I approached Dr. Duchovany and explained what I wanted to do and he agreed to do an independent study for a semester with me, and so he set up a whole separate class that was just me. He really accommodated this very specific project that I wanted to do, that kind of functioned like a honors thesis and ended up being about fifty pages long and really mentored me in a lot of ways, not only in an academic sense as far as grading my papers and giving me feedback, but he also taught me how did research well, and just how to present my findings and my notions about things in a way that I hadn't thought about before there's much more professional than the ways I was attempting to do so before.