The biggest area of growth I have experienced so far as a Vivero Fellow is probably my ability to work one-on-one with someone to complete tasks. The way I worded this may make it seem like I don’t really have something specific in mind, but I do, I just am not sure of its precise name. My experience with working with Dr. Purcell last year (supplemented by my work at the same time doing a MAP) helped me in getting better at self-directing my work and I now feel much more confident in that than I previously did. I think if I were to be given a similar assignment to last semester’s, I would be able to hit the ground running much faster than I did last year. In terms of my biggest weaknesses, I still have not had anyone come to drop-in hours for me to mentor so I think my lack of experience in that area makes me relatively weak. I also feel much more confident in WordPress than any other medium so there are probably some tools that are among my biggest weaknesses as well. My favorite thing to learn as a fellow is probably specific things in Elementor, like getting the menu to work how I wanted it in some particular way, that feeling of having it click for me just felt good. I expect my areas of interest to evolve over time, but I quite enjoyed working with WordPress and think I would enjoy doing something else with WordPress. At the same time, as I indicated, this is subject to change and I think there is a good chance that if I got to know other tools better, I would favor them to some degree. I am selecting this as what I would like most to focus on getting better at. I think that what I would most wish to focus on is mastering Elementor, as that is what I enjoy the most, followed by learning how to do all of the more basic WordPress stuff used to make large changes to the site as a whole. I don’t know all of the things I need to learn, so figuring that out would also be part of the process. I should probably do these in reverse order to ensure that I am covering everything comprehensively. I think if I do not do this I will inevitably get focused on really granular problems and learn less practical knowledge for building WordPress sites than I could. To learn the most basic WordPress site stuff I think seeking out tutorials is a good idea. I know being a Grinnell student gives me access to certain tutorials for things on LinkedIn and that might be a good place to start.

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