Description: MIT 20.219 Becoming the Next Bill Nye: Writing and Hosting the Educational Show, IAP 2015. View the complete course: http://ocw.mit.edu/20-219IAP15.
Instructor: Andrea Desrosiers
License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
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ANDREA: Hi there. This is Andrea's v-log for the 13th of January in regards to the class yesterday, which I guess would have been class six, where basically, we sat down and did a table read of most of the scripts. And it was a fairly good day. I gained an appreciation for how difficult it is to distill all of your ideas down into a small, really good, compact, and compelling story.
And so I thought it was really useful. I hope some of the other students also thought it was pretty useful. I know it's really difficult to stand in the line of fire of six, seven, eight other people who are all critiquing you but I think you guys all did a really wonderful job. And yes, I would want to watch all of your movies. I think they would be all awesome.
So I actually have a couple of confessions to make. First of all, I'm feeling much better today. So I'm much more hopeful about being able to complete the assignment of actually doing some filming in the next few days since I have most of my voice back and I just had to basically sleep all night last night.
But my confession is actually that I've considered dropping or at least reducing down to listener status in this class seven or eight times. It's been probably one of the most difficult classes I've ever taken and that's saying something, since I was a chemistry major and I'm also in business school.
But I think it highlights that we have a lot of potential psychological blocks and it's really instructive to try to get over these mental blocks. And one of them, of course, for me is being on video and being photographed. That's one of them but another one was sort of shifting my mindset from sort of being a product manager, which is what I was prior to coming to school. I was very business-oriented mindset and getting back into the educational mindset.
And I think that that has changed-- I don't want to say, oh my gosh, it's changed my life. But in a sense, it's why I decided to step back from business and to sort of recapture my love of science, of making people successful in science, whether it's small children or other adults who are starting their own businesses. That's really why I came to business school.
And I think this dovetails actually really nicely in with this whole mission. So I'm glad I haven't dropped yet and I'm really hopeful that I can continue my momentum and basically complete everything. And I know it's not going to be perfect. That's another big mental block that sometimes we cling on a lot to perfection. And I know it's going to be a pretty rough cut by next week but it'll be a lot of fun.
So cheers, everyone.