Alumni Impact: Mental Health Awareness in Nepal
Kripa, a FIUTS SUSI alum, has made a documentary highlighting mental health issues.
In honor of World Mental Health Day on October 10, Kripa Sigdel from Nepal, an alumna of the FIUTS SUSI program this past summer, created a video on the theme of "Living with Schizophrenia." Read her blog post below on the process of creating the video and what it meant to her.
Digtal Media is one important way by which we can relay information about untalked-about topics to the masses. And being interested in media and also an exchange student of New Media and Journalism, I thought video-making in the form of documentary would be one way I can raise my voice.
Video-making is an interesting yet difficult task. The video-making process is unfamiliar to me. Also, the video-making, translating, and editing is time-consuming. So, since it's my first audio/video documentary, I tried to use the simple tool ‘Movie Maker’ for the editing and combining video/audio files.
The language we use, the information we try to put and the story we want to portray need to be carefully designed in the video. And for this, I have to say, the information and experience I gained in SUSI 2014 helped a lot. The techniques my instructors gave to report and cover the story helped me while conceptualizing this story - Living with Schizophrenia.
Being a psychology student and interested in such topics, I loved making an audio/video documentary to mark Mental Health Day 2014 with the theme "Living with Schizophrenia." And being interested in New Media and Journalism, this video making process is something which I enjoyed. This gave me encouragement to make other videos and also this helped me to learn from my first one while coming up with others in the near future.
You can watch Kripa's video here. Thank you to Kripa and all the other FIUTS SUSI alumni for their continued work to make the world a better place!
The Study of the U.S. Institutes (SUSI), sponsored by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, promote a better understanding of the people, institutions, and culture of the United States among foreign students, teachers, and scholars. Study of the U.S. Institutes are short-term academic programs for groups of undergraduate leaders, educators, and scholars from around the world.
The program in Seattle is coordinated by the Foundation for International Understanding Through Students (FIUTS), a local non-profit organization affiliated with the University of Washington that promotes international friendship and cross-cultural understanding in the region. The Seattle Globalist, a daily publication covering the connections between Seattle and the rest of the globe, collaborates with FIUTS to deliver courses on topics in journalism and new media.