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 I did the final project as a film with Kayla, Elisa, Val, and Jordan. Since Elisa already posted a detailed summary of each scene in the film, I’ll discuss our intent with the project itself.

When we formed our group, we decided that our film would not cover so much WHAT we learned, but what our PROCESS of learning in the class had been—the evolution of our experiences and our attitudes toward the class and the material it covered. We show a scene depicting the awkward, unsuspecting first day of class when we had no idea what this E Sem even really was, or what to expect from Paul and our classmates. We then depicted some of the many questions we asked throughout the semester about reality and consciousness and what does it all really matter anyway? We expressed how this class has changed the way we perceive the world (the houndstooth scene was kind of metaphorical), and how far we’ve come in “making sense of ourselves.” At the end we showed how our own class had evolved to become a comfortable environment in which we all contributed our perspectives and really listened to other people’s feedback.

Regarding the E Sem’s title, I’m not sure that we ever DID make sense of ourselves—in fact, I’m pretty sure we didn’t—but I don’t think that was necessarily the point. It wasn’t actually making sense of ourselves that we set out to do. It was learning how to ask the right questions and realize that not everything has an answer. We can’t prove every scientific finding out there for ourselves, nor can we really know the truth about most things firsthand. Sometimes we just have to accept that everything’s just stories, and deal with the fact that we will never know everything (or anything) with certainty. And most importantly, we learned that that’s okay. These are the sentiments we attempted to express in our film project, and hopefully we conveyed them. I hope you (all) enjoyed it!

I’ll miss this class. Thank you so much for teaching it. It’s been a great semester!