bragging about an essay i wrote in college

i am only able to write this here because nobody reads my spacehey blog lol. anyway in like...2019 or early 2020? when school was still in person before the pandemic, i took a class about the history of the city of hiroshima, up to and including when the atomic bomb was dropped on it. at the end of the semester, we were allowed to choose a topic for our final paper, which was supposed to be rather lengthy for an undergraduate course. i'll just copy and paste my intro paragraph, because it explains exactly what i chose rather succinctly: 

"The fall of the atomic bomb upon Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, ushered in a new era of human history which was almost immediately labeled the atomic age. The advent of the destructive power of nuclear weaponry impacted almost every facet of culture and media across the world and, given the raw visual power of atom bomb imagery, visual media played (and continues to play) a vital role in speaking to human understanding of that terrible power. Japan in particular, being the first and only nation to date to be actually attacked by nuclear weaponry, spearheaded this genre of atomic bomb-related visual culture in a way no other nation possibly could. Three particular (but, of course, not exhaustive) categories of visual culture have emerged throughout the years when considering Japanese responses to the atomic bomb, and they are labeled here as such: depictions of the day of the attack (oftentimes gory); entertainment dealing with questions surrounding the new atomic age; and (more recently) post-modern abstraction and symbolic art. Each of these types of nuclear-age art serve a different social purpose relating to memory of and reaction to the atomic bomb."

i want to highlight the fact that i just totally made this up on my own. like of course i had the contextual knowledge taught to me that led me to these conclusions, but they were my conclusions! and the older i get the more i'm like, that was actually pretty impressive for a 20y/o! like obviously i'm generalizing quite a bit, as i point out in the paragraph, but i think that is more of an effect of only having learned about this topic for a single semester rather than any truly problematic thinking on my part. i could only pull from sources i was introduced to or already knew about independently, but from that i was able to construct a pretty thorough, convincing analysis of the visual media in the japanese post-war landscape as it related to the atomic bomb. i went through these sources and came up with categories completely independently! i'm pretty proud of myself! 

this is not to say, of course, that there are no mistakes in the essay; re-reading it now, there are definite signs of the amateur, of someone still figuring out how to sound sophisticated in writing, and not merely like a student. my turns of phrase can be clumsy and self-evident at times, referencing the feelings a hypothetical viewer might have upon seeing this visual media, rather than its impact.

i have no doubt that i could pretty easily be proven wrong in my ideas by someone better-versed in this subject than i am/was, but even still, it's the beginnings of a really promising overview of art/media about the bomb. my professor--who was the head of the japanese studies department, so no random gen-ed teacher--said that it was one of the best essays from an undergrad he had ever read. he seemed to genuinely admire it, which was really validating. i'm probably just going back to this because i feel inadequate in my current job, lol.

sometimes i wish i'd stayed in academia, as riddled with problems as it is. i liked writing, i liked learning. i was always pretty good at school. but i live in an expensive city, and beyond the problem of income as an academic, i can't afford to go back to school. maybe someday, though. i'd love to be able to extend and improve this essay further!