On living in my car freshman year

IMG_2516So on Wednesday, USA Today College published my article about living in my car freshman year.  I seriously didn’t think it would be read and shared so many times. All of my other articles on the site didn’t get super high viewership. So when I submitted my car story, I naturally thought it would follow the other viewership patterns of the other articles.

Well…the article was read a lot. Many people gave very kind words (THANK YOU SO MUCH!). Others got deep into debate about the challenging nature of higher education in the country.

Because of the concise nature of the piece, some people naturally had questions after reading. So I will answer some questions below that were commonly asked.

Where did you shower?!?! Did you shower?!?!

Yes, I showered every day. I used the campus recreation center at Texas State along with some other places.

So how did you eat? What did you eat?

Not having a kitchen was a huge challenge but I got by. I mostly ate prepackaged food. There was a microwave in one of the dining halls at Texas State and I used that to cook Ramen noodles, soup and other microwavable foods.

Did you do laundry?

There are laundromats in San Marcos…and I used them.

This guy is lying! All freshmen are required to live on campus!

I did live in my car for my freshmen year of college. I was able to do it because I classified as a commuter. Go to the Texas State housing website  and click on the ‘Commuting from Home of Your Parent/Legal Guardian’.  Reading the paragraph, you will notice that if a student lives within 60 miles of the Texas State campus, then they are exempted from living in the dorms their first year. My parent’s house is within 60 miles. So, I was exempted from having to live in the dorms, meaning I didn’t have to pay for a dorm room (remember that dorms are an additional expense that are NOT included in the tuition and fees).  I instead lived out of my car.

Texas State University

I freaking love Texas State. I feel so lucky to be able to go here. It really is such a great school. The problem isn’t in the college I go to, it’s in the higher education system. Texas State has given me some amazing opportunities and I love going here. I don’t know what I would do without the Texas State advisors that helped me graduate in 2.5 years or the variety of student organizations they have. I’ve loved my time here so far.

Being a Mass Communications Major

Some people mentioned that I should have majored in something “better” than mass communications-public relations because supposedly I won’t be able to find a job after graduation. I understand the reasoning but I’d like to point out that my degree is more than just some typical liberal arts degree. Through my courses, I’ve been able to learn HTML, CSS, Photoshop, public speaking, news writing, campaign strategy and more.

Some of the jobs TXST mass communication grad’s get include: software engineers, public relations specialists, marketing coordinators, development, web designers, graphic designers and so forth. PR specialists, web developers and graphic designers are some of the fastest growing fields right now (and probably for a while). I feel confident in finding a job after graduation.

SXSW: Day 4 Recap

(Day 4: Monday March 10,2014): The day consisted of a panel on psychology and technology in mobile applications, The Golden Age of Drama on TV panel and a taco party hosted by a Texas State mass communication professor.

Nicolas Cage was at SXSW Interactive for day four for a conversation moderated by David Gordon Green. I decided to skip it for something more educational (Yes I know it’s Nicolas Cage, but I wanted to learn stuff at SXSW). The panels I chose involved what I wanted to know more about.

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The first panel, Can You Feel Me Now?, discussing the convergence of psychology and technology in mobile applications was a bit of a bust. The speakers included Cameron Clayton, president of Digital Vision; Gary Klassen, principal architect at Blackberry; Giorgos Zacharia, chief scientist at Kayak. The panel didn’t really discuss much about the psychological techniques used in created better mobile apps. The main thing repeated throughout the panel was how more people are becoming digital natives and wanting something that is easy to use. It turned out to be an okay panel.

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The Golden Age of Drama on TV was a panel on the increased quality of drama TV. Drama series have started to produce quality material that is comparable to theatrical films. Budgets for drama TV has increased, script quality has increased and character development has become way more in depth.

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Alex Cary, executive producer of TNT’s Legends; Hank Steinberg, executive producer of TNT’s The Last Ship; Rob Moynihan, LA correspondent of TV Guide Magazine; and Stephen Kane, executive producer at Turner Broadcasting were speakers for the panel on The Golden Age of Drama on TV.

The new nature of character development and scripts was talked about.

“There used to be a lot of resistance to character development of TV characters” Steinberg said, “with DVR, serialized shows like Lost started to get popular”

Steinberg mentioned that studios have for the most part abandoned mid-level movies. They have opted to focus on shorter, smaller movies and $200 million dollar high packed movies. He said people and studio executives have been looking to TV in the past few years to fill the empty mid-level movie void absent from film.

Steinberg said shooting 10 or 12 episodes of TV provides great efficiency and opportunity for character development. He said it is more optimal to do rather than doing 22 episodes a season without all the scripts ready.

“I’ve never had this before where we have all the scripts ready before shooting. It was great efficiency” Steinberg said.

The last event of the day was a taco party hosted by Cindy Royal, a Texas State mass comm professor who is currently a Knight Fellow at Stanford University. The event was great. I got to talk with a lot of graduates from the graduate program at Texas State. One of them works at NPR now and recently did a panel at SXSW. Another one works at a food bank in Austin. Also there were free tacos and chips at the party so that made it all the more awesome.

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The greatest thing of the day was getting to meet Burt Herman, co-founder of the social media storytelling service Storify. He was pretty awesome and even asked for my website URL.

Feeling accomplished. Day four was a success. Whenever a day includes free tacos (or any food for that matter) you know it’s going to be great.

 

My first USA Today Article

This article is a little strayed from the usual film and television coverage on the blog. Nevertheless, I wanted to share it.

A little background: I’m part of the contributing writer program for USA Today College. The job is to write short articles (300-400 words) covering local interest college-related stories. After a few weeks of stalling and not knowing what to write about, I finally wrote up my first story. It was a piece talking about the a new course called Fundamentals of Digital Media that had been implemented at my college, Texas State University, for mass communication majors.

So I was browsing through my RSS newsfeed when I decided to check the USA Today College tab. I visited the main website and scrolled through the recently added stories. I was a little on nerves since I had submitted a story to USA Today college at the start of the week and had gotten no response back.

My eyes caught something as I scrolled through. There was my article on the recently published stories tab. Clicking on the article in excitement, I saw that it had been published on Thursday, February 27th. It had been published for three days and I hadn’t even noticed!

Although I was filled with excitement (I have an article in USA Today!) I didn’t know whether to tweet it out or not. It was Saturday night so surely not many people would see it. With hesitant fingers I clicked ‘tweet’ on my Twitter application and the article made it’s way to the big ol’ internet.

I didn’t expect much. I was hoping that at least one of my friends would favorite the tweet.

Low and behold, the tweet quickly gained traction and started being shared.

My brother shared it through his social media accounts and a few favorited the tweet.
My brother shared it through his social media accounts and a few retweeted the tweet.

My mental thoughts: “Okay this is good. My friends have a lot of followers so it may get a few views.

Then it stared to go even further…

My professors stared subtweeting and sharing the article.
My professors started subtweeting and sharing the article.

They have thousands of followers. My article was being shared (and had the potential to be read) by thousands of people. Once my college professors started tweeting out the link to the article things picked up speed. Their tweets got a lot of favorites and retweets. The article started being shared more and more from each of their tweets. By 11pm, five hours after my first tweet at 6pm, the article had been retweeted  and favorited over a dozen times.

Several of the lecturers and professors in the School of Mass Communication at Texas State loved the article (and some even pulled quotes from it!). I was beyond trilled and did a little victory dance. A piece I had written had gotten published on a national news website!

Despite this upcoming week being ridden with midterms, I can walk through those doors to the School of Mass Comm with a sense of accomplishment. It’s only one article, nevertheless I’m happy with the overwhelmingly positive response to it. The first of hopefully many USA Today articles! Go check the article out here

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