Online Portfolio

English 8123 Digital Media Production

Overview
For your final project, you will create an online portfolio tailored to your current career needs. 

Rationale
Sooner or later, you will face the next step in your professional career: searching for a job, applying to a PhD program, etc. At a time when hardcopy portfolios are becoming obsolete, electronic portfolios are becoming a norm, and online portfolios a more common occurrence than ever. As English or Communication majors, having an online portfolio will give you an additional edge. 

This online portfolio project, I hope, will

  • provide you with a new means of marketing yourself in lieu of the traditional hardcopy or electronic portfolio,
  • allow you to better market yourself, with space for more content and multimedia technologies to make your portfolio more dynamic, and
  • give you a new platform where you can better use your creativity.

Portfolio Content Orientation
The content of your portfolio will depend on what you want to do when you graduate from the current program. The way I see it in terms of career purposes, you will most likely fall into one of the following categories:

MA Students

  1. To go on to a PhD program
  2. To find a lecturer or adjunct position at a college
  3. To find a teaching position at a K-12 school
  4. To find an industry position

PhD Students

  1. To find a teaching position at a college
  2. To find an industry position

Your career goals determine whether your portfolio will be academically oriented or industry oriented. This means, of course, that the contents you put into a portfolio will be very different.

Portfolio Content
The following are typical items we see in most graduate student portfolios. Of course, you don’t necessarily need to include all of them.

  • Professional Profile
  • Curriculum Vita or Professional Resume
  • Personal statement
  • Writing/publication samples
  • Project samples 
  • Teaching philosophy
  • Sample syllabi
  • Sample assignments
  • Student evaluations
  • Teaching observation/evaluations

Project Components

  • Online portfolio
  • Rhetorical analysis (this should be emailed to me)