Welcome to my Portfolio!

About Me

Hello my name is Alana and this is my portfolio showcasing the work I am proud of that I have completed over the course of year 12 for units 3 and 4 for VCE VM.

I have completed a certificate III in Creative Digital Media specialized in Game Design over the past 2 years and I am hoping to pathway into cybersecurity as taking the game design course has made me realize that yes, even though I have a creative passion and want to create games doing all the designing and creating, is not for me especially to pursue as a career because I enjoy typing and coding more than drawing and designing.

I believe my strengths and weakness are that i am a very hardworker when it comes to my career and livelyhood because i am able to manage having 3 jobs aswell as still doing school but a weakness i have with that is i tend to procrastinate and become bored easily especially at school if we would be learning something that im not engaged with i just wouldn't do it which ties into another weakness i believe i have which is being stubborn when it comes to certain things, if i dont get a truthful answer or if i just don't want to be engaged with something. My ability to talk and continue a conversation is a positive but it can be a negative when i tend to drag a conversation and just don't stop talking. I am a very independent person and like to do everything on my own but that comes at it's own cost especially at work when because i want to do things on my own i get tasked with a much higher work load because i dont want to work with people but i can work well in a team if the people in that team can keep up with me and what i'm doing.

Outside of school I have an interest in music, 2000s culture, video games, and programming. With this website showing my personal passion for programming I want to hopefully turn this into my own personal website taking more inspiration from sites I follow on Neocities and my own MySpace page. I really love and have an obsession with 2000’s and 2010’s internet, pop culture, and fashion culture and I want to use that to bring back more third places into communities as a space for teenagers to actually be teenagers and not be forced to act older than they are.

I would like to consider myself an advocate for mental health and womens rights as those are two issues that affect me in my daily life so whenever I see anything that infringes on womens rights or something that is stigmatizing and belittling mental health I always try and get my opinion out and try to make whoever is saying these things rethink their own opinions. In relation to caring about womens rights and mental health I also care about the future of children as we can see in this day and age we have an influx of teenagers from age 13 to 17 not having any representation of their age group in their communities and in the media they consume and because of this we have an entire age range practicing in unsafe behaviours by majority of the time trying to act older than they are by being influenced by adults in their early to mid twenties who obviously make the choice in drinking, partying and recreational drug use, being mainly their own source of influence which is what is ruining a generation and it is highly detrimental to our youth so I wish to hopefully path the way, in Australia at least, to being back and normalize third spaces in the community that are targeted towards teenagers and with more people speaking out about this epidemic I hope we can see the return of teenagers actually being allowed to be kids.

Post School Reflection

My reflection I have on the 6 years I’ve had at this school is that I believe yes, I have learned some helpful educational information that I believe will stick with me into my future life but a lot of the things I’ve been taught here are just very useless to me. Year 7 to year 10 I personally think I did not learn anything of worth that will help me in the future, I’m happy that I got advice for what pathway I should take for senior year levels as if I undertook standardized VCE I think as an addition to being bored out of my mind I would be even more stressed and I would’ve just stopped coming to school because of the mix of being at school boring me, the workload being too much, and hating 99 percent of the students at this school.

In year 11 and 12 I am very thankful for taking the VCE VM pathway as I believe it has helped me in being not just a better student but a better person socially as being in an environment with majority social butterflies that like to go out and party and have fun has helped me get out of my shell and be able to talk to anyone and keep up conversations with people and not have to rely on school topics and being kept up in technology. In regards to education VM has taught me more skills that will pertain to my everyday and outside of school life because compared to knowing how to calculate algebraic formulas from the top of my head, which will definitely not help me in my future, we were taught how to calculate tax, hard and soft employability skills, how to excel at public speaking and how to make a change in your community

5 Year Plan

For my 5-year plan this was very hard to think of, as mentioned above I would like to consider myself a big advocate for mental health and women’s rights which is why if you were to ask me at the start of high school where I see myself in 5 years or post high school I would’ve said most likely dead. As someone that’s had mental health issues majority of my teen life I did not imagine getting to the end of year 12 let alone being 18 so having a concrete plan to get to this point and continue in life wasn’t really thought out. I do believe that i have changed and developed enough as a person to start thinking about actually being present enough in the next 5 years to hopefully accomplish something.

My plan for the next 5 years relating to education and my career is to be completing a pathway in cyber security with the certificate IV taking a year to complete, a bachelor's degree taking 3 years to complete and a masters taking 2 years. Whilst undertaking these studies I want to start my own business to pave the way in bringing back third spaces for young people. I want to implement my already thought up idea for a record store mixed with a café to create a space that is very similar to a library with a café in it.

In my personal life for the next 5 years I aim to still be close with my friends from secondary school even though we are most likely not going to see each other very often after school finishes this year and I hope that with my extended knowledge of computing and cybersecurity I can use that to get industry placement or freelance jobs that can help financially for my family with bills and paying our house off.