Tuesday, October 28, 2008

My Day At SCSU :)

When I first heard about this flied trip I was very excited. And I am not going to lie to you, it was because I really did not want to be in school that Friday. On the way there, certain things started running through my head, like: should i have really came on this trip, what if its boring, I am missing a lot of work to go on this trip, and I already had a pile of absences and it is still not even the 2nd quarter of the year.

But when I got there, I knew almost instantly that I had made the right choice. Being a senior, it is pretty sad that this was my first time being on a college campus and in a way, I am glad it was. That just made my day that much memorable.

We started off the conference with an opening "meet and greet" session, at least that is what I called it. A few of the different speakers and professors who were running the conference introduced themselves and talked a little bit about what it was all about. Not to long after that began was it time to break up and find our designated rooms.

Previously I had signed up for two discussions to go to. The first was "Getting it right: Journalism Ethics" I had signed up for this workshop because I have always been interested in ethics, so i wanted to learn about how ethics ties into journalism. I most definitely did, and I learned so much more then expected. As I have said in my most recent blog entry, the Professor Jerry Dunklee is a really cool dude.

Once it was time to move to the next workshop, I, along with a fellow classmate, Maddie, decided to go to "Literary journalism: Fictional Techniques to make Reporting Sparkle. Unfortunately, this workshop had no sparkle. We then moved on from workshop to workshop until we finally found one that we felt would provide us with the valuable information that we wanted to get. "All you need to know about journalism" was very informational and both Maddie and I learned a lot and got a lot out of it. One of the things she said that really stuck with me was "From here on out, it is all a competition."

We finished off the session with a keynote speaker, Rob Parker. He is a famous sports reported who graduated from Southern. He told all of us to keep dreaming and to never give up because we can do it. He was a very inspirational speaker who said "If you fall down and bump your head you can always get up and keep going."

In conclusion, this day was more then worth it and I am extremely happy that I decided to go and I hope something like this comes up again before this semester ends.

1 comment:

Miller said...

Megan: I'm glad you got a lot out of this conference. I've always believed that some of the best educational experiences can happen outside the classroom.

I'm interested to know what you learned about journalism ethics. You say "I most definitely did, and I learned so much more then expected." This would be a great place to reflect on that and share that information.