Looking back

A brief segway away from college and back to High School.

I think every kid is convinced they want nothing more than to get out of their hometown when they graduate high school.

And then memories of good times try to lead you back after college.

So what do you do when you come to the realization that your home town is nothing but a dead end for you?

I wanted more than anything to return to Independence after College.

But there's nothing there for me.

Kansas City maybe...in time. I'd like to go back to Kansas City. A big question there is, will Kansas City have me? It's such a big media market, it's not always a place for starters.

But the people I grew up with are not the same people anymore. Looking at their new pictures I barely recognize them. Still checking up on the news of my hometown I see things have changed.

It's hard to know what I want. It's hard to know where I want to go anymore. It's strange once you stop feeling the pull back to that town, back to your old High School.

I guess all I know right now is what I want to be doing "when I grow up" and who I want to be doing it with. From there...we'll see.

Reviewing my Journalism Education. One Year At a Time. Part 1

Hindsight is 2020. Mine is 2010 HA! No, but really...

Seeing as how the final class of my Undergraduate career, and more than likely my final class ever is tomorrow afternoon and I'm in the process of applying for jobs, I'm a little nostalgic on my last 4 years of J-School. So I apologize, these posts will somewhat resemble a brain-dump...but if you so choose, join me on my journey.

Summer Welcome: traumatic. My parents read on the registration papers that they weren't required to attend. So they shipped me off to Summer Welcome by myself in a city 2 hours away. This should have been a pretty good indicator as to how my journalism education was going to work...being thrown in against my will...head first.

Needless to say if you know anything about Mizzou's Summer Welcome...I was the ONLY person there, in a group of around 200 without a parent. And without a friend. So I was a little alienated until I met a girl here (with her parents) from New Mexico. I was kind of adopted into the Costales Family...and to this day Gabrielle Costales and I are still the best of friends, and we will be walking the stage together next week. (Holy cow...is it really next week?? Grumble...)

Freshman Year First Semester: Oh how I miss dorm food. But NOT my first roommate with cleanliness issues and NOT my first round of classes that seemed to resemble busy work. Bio class, psychology, Spanish 2...don't miss those. My first Journalism class...J 1010 AKA Career Explorations in Journalism AKA a complete waste of a weekday evening. I could have gotten the same thing out of that class as if someone had come in to my dorm for a 2 hour required meeting on the different sequences. It was recruiting. And it felt like recruiting. I remember being told it was the first of the "weeder" classes that would weed people not truly interested in Journalism out of the field. Frankly, the class was deceptively easy, and most definitely not a weeder class.

What else I remember from this semester...I remember heartbreak. Losing that High School Significant Other that everybody told me and everyone else in that situation to leave at home. I didn't. And I paid for it with my social life. I didn't bother making very many friends. I was depressed. My parents dropped me off and left me. My boyfriend dropped me off and left me. And gosh darn it, I was going to sit at home and sulk and hope that there would be a knock on my tiny little dorm room door. That knock never came. And I learned, with the help of my friends Gabby, Missy, and Mickey, that I needed to pick myself up and focus on what was important. So I did, and I somehow managed to come out of that semester with flying colors. And a few new friends.

Freshman Year Second Semester: This is when the fact that I was a college student and I had to make my own way truly hit home. It took some tough love from my new group of friends the Lunch Bunch to get there. But without this semester I would have been packing it home to UMKC's College of Pharmacology. I decided that journalism was more important to me. So I stayed. And I sat through Principles of American Journalism, which is a class I remember very little of. What hit home to me...Jaqui Banaszynski's presentation. That showed me the difference journalism can make in the world. And from that moment on I was absolutely addicted.

I hate writing cover letters.

I suppose as a journalist I'm more accustomed to telling other's stories. I watch them, I listen to them to get some kind of insight into what makes them tick. Then I take the facts I know and mix everything together into a piece that exposes it all.

So why can't I do that for myself? Why can't I market myself the same way?

My time in the spotlight is supposed to be spent telling others stories...not my own.

Maybe that's why this whole cover letter thing is so difficult for me.

P.S. If you get a chance, watch the video for the soldiers who re-made the Gaga/Beyonce Telephone video. Hilarious. That's a story I'd like to tell.

Journo Road Trip!

Awesome!

K-Proud and I spent a total of 5 hours in the car yesterday traveling through scenic northern Missouri. Some of the sights were a man selling Bonsai trees out of a van, a peculiar way to transport farmers, the home of sliced bread, and maybe the awesomely-named "No Creek" Creek.

Our mission: travel to the city of Trenton, MO for an experiment with a video format for MNH. We were asked to chronicle what a small town's political interests were.

While I heard pretty much what I expected about the political needs of a small town, there's one thing as a journalist in Mid-Mo that I'm not used to hearing, and that's thanks. These people were so grateful that Kelsey and I would take time out of our "busy schedules" to come and try to make their needs public that the Mayor simply could not stop thanking us.

Maybe it's because I come from two incredibly media-saturated towns, but I'm not used to people thanking me for my services. It's my job. I do it because I love it. And, it's nice to see that some people in the world are still glad to have us visit.

Does a girl's heart good to actually hear what I'm doing could make a difference...because frankly, people around these parts sometimes forget that.

So did I mention...

...the website is up! And running! And fully functional!

Which means job applications start going out...tomorrow.

So HIRE ME! Thanks.

Oh...and something to brighten your day...Chad Mira put this on his twitter and I thought it was hillarious. It's what News Anchors do during commercial breaks.

Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7ehlw_phys

Food for thought...

Random musing courtesy Kent Collins...

Does a building burn up? Or does a building burn down?

Or can it do both?

Ha...this will cause me to lose sleep.

Dial 1-800-HTML-HELP

I am so fed-up with getting my website ready that I could just cry. It seems like the second I get one thing going and working, the entire format just falls apart. I've got the website built...now I'm adding content. I'm attempting to add 7 photos and their captions to my "Other Work" page. I've styled the photos so they show up all aligned to the right side of my content container. But, when I preview them, they look scattered everywhere. And when I go back to add the caption into the page...it really does scatter everywhere in dreamweaver.

It's been like this the entire time I've been building this website and I'm one more meltdown away from going to wordpress. I realize that HTML coding is something I need to have a basic understanding of for what I want to do for my job. And It's important to know a software like Dreamweaver. And I thought having a website to showcase that I know all of that instead of using a template-based service would be the thing to do. But I'm getting grey hairs here...really...no jokes. I invite you to come look at my scalp. If the KOMU HDTV signal doesn't show them, feel free to ask.

The most frustrating thing of it all...I can't start applying for jobs until it's ready. And frankly, I need to get on that. Quickly. I looked at the calendar today and realized I graduate in less than a month, and my website isn't even ready. Granted, my resume is on it. Just, none of my work is either formatted correctly or visible.

I know that once I get this done I will be immensely proud of it. It's been a very long, very hard journey, and I'm so close I can smell it. But right now it's really discouraging that I can see the finish line and not get there.

Speaking of seeing the finish line and not being able to get there...

Fell down the stairs last night and fractured my ankle. So I'm in a boot. I can't wait to head back to the Capitol for MNH in my ortho-boot. Oh, and MNH, speaking of seeing the finish line and not being able to get there...

Now you see why I'm going grey?