The Perfect Distraction

Online resources, a perfect distraction. I am not talking about facebook or pinterest, although those are fair competition, but rather Lynda.com.

As a student at Penn you have free access to Lynda.com with your penn login. Naturally there are hundreds of programs that would be amazing to learn and no time in which to learn them. Or at least that is how I used to consider my schedule.

However, with the studio behind me producing short 6 minute films of site research and interviews with chartiable organizations I caught the bug for video editing. I had taken TV in elementary school and again in high school. While I can’t remember what program I was taught Adobe Premiere looks familar enough. So I have settled on taking my breaks from now on to watch Lynda tutorials in the hope that all my jumbled Eagles Superbowl celebration film can be put to good use. While I doubt it will be a five star film, it will certainly be an interesting start. From there who knows maybe architectural walk throughs as a video experience rather than a still image will be a newer trade mark of my work.

While I am being overly optimistic about my outcomes in film, the reality of this post is simply that while in school we are presented with an overabundance of resources, more than half of which go unused or unexplored because we never think we have enough time.

Yes the project for studio is important. Yeah turing in the BIM file/History Paper/Structures problems etc is neccessary. And each of those classes and assignments will give you certain skills. However to drown yourself in their importance and limit any outside learning is more debiltating than you may think.

While I really don’t think I have enough time to sleep, eat peacefully three times a day, exercise for an hour a day, go to class, finish all the assigned work in time, and still have some kind of “life”, reaching for that is better than settling for just school, or so I say admist the stress of midterms. So if I am to distract myself for a little while at least I can make use of my resources and gain an extra skill while doing so.

Below is a list of resources (to be updated a new sources are found):

• https://www.isc.upenn.edu/lyndacom (click on get service to login)
• https://www.isc.upenn.edu/magpi (seems like a research database shared amongst various institutions)