Sophomore Year Blogging Intentions!

I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to write for my first blog of my sophomore since the end of last semester. When writing my blogs last year, I felt like I was flying by the seat of my pants most of the time. My blogs came out on Mondays, which meant that they were due on Saturdays. A lot of the time, I would get busy with schoolwork and/or procrastinate writing my blogs ‘til the morning of and then churn out a half-baked review of an album I really liked but definitely hadn’t spent enough time with. Some of those I think turned out okay, but I’m not necessarily proud of them. I’m proud of a couple of my blogs, but in general, I was trying to figure everything out, from being in a new city as an out of state student, to figuring out my first ever college classes, to trying to make friends. It was a lot, and very distracting

But now I’m a sophomore! I’m living with the same roommate I had last year in a better dorm, and I actually have things I know and like to do in the city. That makes all the difference. I also have concrete goals for my blog! I applied for the UIC Radio with no real objective besides the fact that I really wanted to write about music and meet new people. Now that I’ve been with the radio for a year, I really want to lock in. I love writing and I love music, and I’ve only had amazing experiences at the radio so far. It’s exciting to be familiar with something. So here are my intentions for the upcoming semester, and all of the semesters beyond this one.

When I write a music review, I need to be reading interviews by the artist and looking into the context that the music was made in. That’s something I really care about when listening to music on my own time as well. When I talk about an album, I really don’t want to just say my opinion. I want to love a project so much that I want to dissect it and tell everybody about every little detail of it. I also don’t like to do negative or even lukewarm reviews about albums, unless there’s a larger story behind it that I’m really interested in. When I’m choosing what to write about, I don’t want to pick something that feels easy just because it’ll be quick to write. I love writing reviews of music I enjoy, but I would default to them last semester and half-ass them just to make sure I got something in on time. I want to challenge myself to write more in-depth, longer blogs. This includes blogs that would take me multiple weeks to finish, that would need me to publish other, shorter blogs in the meantime.

Probably the biggest thing that I’m going into this new year of blogging with, though, is my want to learn. Over the summer, my interest in learning about music and expanding the kinds of music that I listen to, and care about, exploded. I want my blogs this year to be a tool for me to learn. Even if I’m picking a topic for a blog that I know nothing about, I want to give myself a brief crash course over the week that I have to write and then report my findings in the resulting blog. I really want to approach my blogs as earnestly as I can, especially because music is something that I really care about and want to know so much more about. It’s also something that continuously brings me closer to the people I love and helps me meet new people that I will grow to love.

All in all, I’m really excited for my sophomore year. Freshman year was hard for me and didn’t let me give as much attention to my writing as I wanted it to. I’m happy to say that even though we’re only two weeks into the semester, this one already blows the last one out of the water. To more fun writing!