Immigrant Project

A couple weeks ago our teacher assigned us to interview an adult immigrant. I ended up interviewing my mom Ana because it was easier and more efficient. After I picked my interviewee I had to write questions, this was a pretty easy and quick thing for me because I am good at generating questions. But after I wrote my questions it got more difficult because I had to make sure my questions weren’t repeated so I would get the information I  needed to make a video.  After a few days, I used my questions to conduct an interview. The way I did my interview was that I recorded the interview on my mom’s phone and I got the questions onto my phone and I did ask the questions and she gave responses. I later used the video to write a narrative of my mom and her immigration journey. It was very hard for me to write the narrative and I ended up not finishing it and going straight to the script. The script was basically a plan for the video. I started making slides by just narrating all the slides then I went back and added pictures, and text, and edited everything. When I saw the final video I kind of liked it but when we watched someone else’s in tech class I ended up not liking mine. I had a crazy idea to start over and I tried I wrote a really different script and used a different approach and after I put everything together it turned out really good. In the end, it wasn’t such a crazy idea.

 

Something I learned from this huge immigrant experience was that no matter where you are you can always find a way to be happy even if it means you have to give up some things. This is very meaningful and it makes me very grateful that we had this project. I also learned a lot more about my mom and her life.

 

While doing this assignment something that surprised me was how much information I can learn from one interview. Another thing that surprised me was how clueless I was about my mom’s life and why we moved. Looking back at the immigrant journey we went on I finally realized why we moved and how important immigration is because being an immigrant because of part of your identity.

 

The most frustrating was when my first version didn’t turn out that good because I had to redo and it was really stressful because I didn’t think I would make it. But in the end, it turned out pretty good and was a good experience.

 

Overall I really enjoyed this experience and I think it was very memorable. Especially when I showed the final video to my mom and she started crying.