Trinity Fellows Program Director Carole Ferrara dropped by #loweclass on Monday afternoon. We were lucky enough to interview her about her work with Trinity.
Each semester Professor Lowe’s Journalism 2100 class works together on a project. Last semester the class created a digital story about the Educational Opportunity Program. This semester the project will be about the Trinity Fellows Program led by Ferrara. Ferrara spoke enthusiastically about the program. Lauren Brown, a health studies minor from Indianapolis commented that she was struck by Ferrara’s “quiet confidence” and her belief in the program. Before the interview with Ferrara it was difficult to find information about her online. The website is dedicated entirely to information about the students and the program. After she left Professor Lowe commented that Ferrara has deliberately left herself out of the website. Ferrara’s focus is very much on the students and what they are doing in the community. This display of humility is impressive as Ferrara is responsible for so much of the work done by Trinity. This project has loads of potential because of the variety of work done by the students. The vast array of agencies working with Trinity will allow us to create unique stories within the website. Jack Goods, a marketing minor from Buffalo was excited to work on data visualization. He heard her talk about a few details with numbers and already imagined where the class could take that information. I am ecstatic to find out who my subject will be. Our class seemed energized by Ferrara’s words yesterday.
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The creation of my State of the Union “What they’re saying” page required trips to several different sites for examples. After finding a good starting point with the Baltimore Sun article shared in the Facebook group the next step was to find other good examples. Searching for a wide variety of topics was another important piece in starting the project.
Perhaps the most interesting page I stumbled upon was this annotated version of the address. The page linked nearly every line of the speech to a tweet that gave more insight. This served as a good model for my page even though the layout was completely different. Being able to read something and get the information, but this was a simple but great model of having the option to learn more with just one click. Another great example that was quite different but had the same premise was The Washington Post’s collection of headlines. The page simply posted a headline followed by a comment. This served as a nice model on how to curate the page. Finding content was not difficult considering the tools at my disposal. Twitter was more trouble to use than expected but one reason for that is a general lack of political news sources in my own feed. The search turned up a surprising amount of non-news users even after narrowing the search to top tweets only. I learned that you can scroll through 10 sources shockingly fast. These types of pages should scroll on for ages. Ideally a "what they're saying" page would have upwards of 20 sources. The links either need to cover a massive variety of topics and outlets or the reader needs to click through and read each one In order for someone to become really informed on a page like this with just 10 links. The State of the Union address divides people no matter what the president says or who the president is. It would be hard to find a better topic for which to create a page like this. I threw together a resume in the spring of 2014 for a job application that I had already landed an interview for. I had little experience to list and the entirety of my resume was high school achievements and jobs with just a hint of the limited experience I had in college.
Upon further review, this resume was entirely useless. Using two students’ resumes as examples I began the process of rebuilding the few shambled remains of my old resume into something I hoped would blossom like a beautiful flower. The two resumes I used as examples were very different in the sense that one was flooded with journalism internships and experiences and the other was seeking out a first internship in the same field. The two resumes were on opposite ends of the spectrum and I hoped to find a happy medium between them. The first major change was to make the resume one page. How had I created such a long resume with such a minuscule amount of relevant experience? I am still pondering this. After cutting out all of the useless information (everything except my name), I set about formatting my new draft. I used the layout of the resume with more experience because I now have several career-relevant experiences to list. This resume was not a perfect template for me though because I was still a bit short in the experience department. Next I took a look at the resume with less experience to see how the subject filled the empty space. I added a “skills” section to finish building the resume. I closed the two examples I had used and graded my resume against the other six while reading the comments about them. I made a few minor tweaks and checked for errors a second time. My last step was to go through this resume reading again to make sure my resume was acceptable based on the authors’ suggestions (or demands). A few more minor tweaks and final edit and my resume was set, for the moment anyway. Rest in peace my useless, somewhat comedic resume of old, and hello to the resume that will launch me forward, fingers crossed. I created my LinkedIn profile over a year ago, but paid little attention to it until this summer. A bit of googling led me to make several minor changes to my page, but the biggest change in my renewed interest in LinkedIn was that I began expanding my network. Of course, there was still plenty of work to be done.
First I looked at the profile checklist to see how well I had done building my profile. I was surprised at how poorly I had done considering LinkedIn told me I was an “All-Star” before this #loweclass professional identity extravaganza. My photo checked out, but my headline did not. After correcting my mistake I scrolled through the entire checklist, worried I may be working on this all night. The rest of the checklist required minor tweaks, but did not have any massive issues (or so I thought). I checked out Jacquelyn Smith’s article on what to say in my LinkedIn summary statement because I figured mine needed an update. What I actually needed was not an update, but a complete overhaul. Smith encouraged a level of personalization that I had never thought about. She also suggested summaries that were four or five times the length of mine. Fixing this part of my profile was by far the most difficult venture of this whole project. Probably the biggest issue with my use of LinkedIn’s professional network was that not only had I not taken advantage of the tools I could use to find jobs and employers, I had no idea how to use them. I bookmarked the article Using LinkedIn to Find a Job or Internship with a quickness. That microsite and the MSOE article about the 14 mistakes I’m making on LinkedIn helped me realize that I was missing out on a great function, message personalization. I loved the LinkedIn app on my phone, the app where you cannot personalize connection invitations. This will not be a problem in the future. Two other mistakes the most recently mentioned article taught me were minor but important. First, I did not realize I could break my website down into sections. I also had no idea that LinkedIn had a special list of skills that the search engine recognizes (and that employers search for). These are details that will be important to me as I continue to update my page and develop my network. Now my hope is that the connections I had before this massive profile overhaul will give me another chance. My major is journalism because of my passion for telling stories. The focus is in sports because of my love for reading, writing and discussing the game. My dream is for journalism to take me into the world of sports media. Marquette was the right place for me because of the chance to work in student media as an underclassmen and because of the rare setting as a small Division 1 school in an urban setting.
My entire life was spent on a farm and which sparked the desire to live in a city. Milwaukee screamed adventure so I took the chance. After graduation the goal is to get a job working in sports media regardless of the medium. Working for a radio station, television station, newspaper, blog or sports outlet of any kind would be interesting to me. The end goal would be to work for a major network. My life long dream is to be on Around The Horn going head to head against Woody Paige and Bomani Jones. Working at a newspaper, hosting a radio show and appearing on television multiple times a week to talk about sports would be perfect. It's it hard to believe that they pay people to do that. One of my biggest challenges in Digital Journalism II was narrowing my story down and finding a specific angle. Another problem is finding too many things to talk about in a story and then talking about all of them. Another challenge has been writing leads for feature stories. Writing hard news leads has been one of my strengths. Another strength of mine in both of my previous digital journalism classes was my ability to work with the feedback received from instructors. It was quite rare that I would receive the same critique multiple times on one assignment. Moving forward some goals could be to get better at interviewing, selecting specific story angles, copyediting and critiquing my own work. |
AboutOn this page you can find blog posts about my adventures in journalism, ponderings about projects, experiences with storytelling tools and updates on what I'm working on. Archives
February 2017
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