thestoryofjory.com

If you hadn’t already heard via Twitter, Facebook, or screams of joy loud enough to cover three counties, I successfully defended my thesis!

You, my dear friends, have been absolutely crucial to me, and I wanted to again say how much I appreciate your support, kind words, and funny text messages while I’ve been working on this.  I’ve felt down and out many times during this journey, but you guys always knew how to pep me right back up. It’s an amazing feeling to have finished a project that’s been two years in the making, and now you never again have to ask how my thesis is coming along!!

Now that the thesis is done, I feel comfortable making a new big announcement – I’ve been hired to teach at Oklahoma State University for the Fall and Spring semesters.  The course is MC 2023 Electronic Communication, and I have 4 sections of the class.  I’ll be teaching the terminology and fundamentals of creating content for the web, as well as getting the students started on their online portfolios and blogging. I don’t think I could be any more excited about this opportunity and I can’t wait for school to start! (Never thought I’d say that again, haha.)

Later, I’ll post an abstract of my thesis along with any information I have about where you can read it, if you like.  Anyway, I think academic writing makes great bedtime reading material!

This is Amy Zerba.

She is an associate producer for CNN.com, journalism professor at University of Florida, and all-around nice person.  She came to OSU SJB earlier this week to lead a workshop on multimedia journalism for SJB faculty. As a new faculty member, I was invited to participate in the workshops, and I am very grateful that I did.  I gained so much just hearing about her experience in the field as a working journalist.  She also gave me a lot of insight into the workings of a major news outlet that I can share with my students in the Fall.  Knowing what skills Amy has had to develop to create her stories, I’ll be able to better prepare my students for diverse careers in strategic communication.

I also gained a lot from hearing my professors-turned-coworkers argue about… pretty much everything.  Amy had to put up with her instructions getting derailed by debate on more than one occasion, but she was such a champ about it.  On the last day, we spent as much time debating production value and newsworthiness as we did working on the assignment.  The assignment was to edit something in FCP, and since I’m already adept at that, I just sat on the couch and soaked in the discussions. The most interesting part of these debates were the vastly different, but equally correct, perspectives each individual held given their specialty.  Public relations instructor Bill Handy had a different outlook on the presentation of some of the news stories than did Marc Krein, the broadcast production instructor, or Barbara Allen, print journalist and adviser to the student newspaper.  Miraculously, they all seem to really like each other despite these differences of opinion.

Barbara Allen & Amy Zerba

Marc Krein

Bill Handy

One of the other benefits of attending the workshop was that I started getting better, more defined ideas about lessons and teaching opportunities for my classroom in the fall.  Amy shared a lot of great resources, especially links to online learning and teaching tools like lynda.com.  My fellow instructors also gave me a lot of great advice and many different perspectives from which to view strategic communication.  I hope to take the experience of the workshop and use it to build excitement for new journalism in my students and myself.  I can’t wait for school to start.