By April Foley, Oakland University

Overall, my project took about three weeks to complete. Between being a full-time college student and working full-time, it was hard to prioritize my time properly. Once I chose my topic, I began researching and brainstorming. I knew what the vision of my project I had in my mind looked like, but I couldn’t figure out how to transfer that onto paper. My original project started as a PowerPoint, and eventually evolved into the project you have viewed now. Transferring from a PowerPoint to a website was somewhat difficult at times. In my first project, I did not have as much verbiage included, so I started there. I wanted to include a brief summary of the subject and what had happened to them. Once I had all of my verbiage in order, I started on pictures. Pictures alone took about a week to come together. There are thousands of pictures that pertain to my topic so picking and choosing which ones fit was the most time consuming part of my project. Once I had my pictures in order, I moved to videos. I wanted to include videos that discussed every victim and their story without them being too graphic and hard to watch. Most videos out there contained a lot of graphic images and scenes that I felt were physically damaging for viewers and insensitive. From there, I conducted a survey with a series of questions that pertained to my topic. Creating graphs and charts of my survey results was the least time-consuming part of my project. I wanted to include these results as I felt it shed a light on how people view and feel about police brutality and racial injustices. Once I had all of my information, graphics, and references in order, I started creating and designing the website. This became rather easy after the first page and kind of flowed together naturally. After a few tweaks and edits, and of course peer reviews, I felt it was ready to submit, and that is what you’re viewing today.