Wrapping up an amazing semester in J198

While I don't think my blog posts have been the most descriptive things ever, I have to say that my experience in J198 might possibly have been the most rewarding in my whole career as a Lehigh University student. To be completely honest, I owe my new found career track to Jeremy Littau and thank him with my whole heart for pointing me in the direction that I will be heading for the near future in my life.

To back track, I'm using this post to go over what I liked and what I didn't so much love about this course. I suppose it's better to start with bad so as to end on a positive note. Ok so as a second semester senior, this class is a TON of work. Editing processes alone took hours upon end in addition to the amount of time it took to get footage and to initially find where we wanted to go for the footage. BUT--to say that the hours of time we put in was for nothing is a blatant lie. Especially now that the class has ended, it's impossible to say that nothing was done without reason and without an educational value to it. I now know how to work the newest generation of video recorders, how to work a movie editing program and how to stand up in front of a camera and use personality to introduce and end a story. In fact, I really learned that a little enthusiasm can take you a long way--but apparently not win you a Pulitzer, right Jeremy!?!?

I guess the long hours and hard work are my only complaints which actually make me sound pretty pathetic as a college student, so I'm moving right along to the reasons why I loved this class. Like I said before, we did every exercise for a reason. Despite the work, I learned so much by doing things in a hands-on fashion, rather than just reading about it in the textbooks. What I really loved about Multimedia Reporting was the emphasis on social media. I had never used Twitter before this class and now, I can't imagine my life without the site. Everything I've done this semester, whether it was for class or not, was documented via my tweets. I love it!!!

I also loved the size of the class. Because there were very few of us, we got to be a close group and developed relationships with each other as well as with Jeremy. The small size enabled us to feel close enough to ask each other questions and to be each others teachers.

Hmmm what else did I love??? I liked the fact that the end of the semester was used solely to work on our projects. Once we had all the knowledge on how to use the programs, we were able to use class time to get our work done. This worked really well because I am on an entirely different schedule than my groupmates, and we knew that 1-3 on Wednesdays definitely worked for all of us, so we definitely were able to take advantage of class time to get things done.

And lastly, it was great that we started working on our final projects almost at the beginning of the semester. I didn't know either one of my groupmates before this class, so working with them for the whole semester really lent itself for us to get to know each other. Now, as a group, we couldn't be any prouder of what we accomplished and created as a team!

So yeah, for now, that's why I LOVED J198. If I weren't graduating and if Wally Trimble can come up with a way for students to take this class twice, I would sign up again in a heart beat.