Time Flies With or Without the Fun

With Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas all within a few weeks of each other its easy to get caught up in costumes, turkey, and wish lists.. I feel like I snapped out of it just in time to realize that this semester is over. Usually I associate the end of the semester with stress, but a hint of relief. Relief from knowing that in a weeks time all of my cramming and all-nighters will pay off with a month long vacation. This semester, I feel like that relief has been replaced with fear. As oppose to spending the month of December home catching up with old friends, I'll have to finally put some thought into what I'm gonna do with my life once I graduate. This semester flew by, the next will do the same, and I'll be forced into the "real world." Scary!
After taking this multimedia journalism class this semester, I can honestly say I'm a little less nervous, and a little more excited about the future.

This semester I've been introduced to new programs and skills which I would have never thought myself capable of learning. So rather than fearing that I have only a semester left, I instead feel grateful I have another semester to become more familiar with a lot of things we were briefly introduced to earlier this semester. I think this course did a good job of touching on different aspects of multimedia being used in journalism today. Because a semesters time obviously isn't long enough to teach us in detail the ins and outs of every program, I think we got a pretty thorough introduction. We were able to put together slide shows, podcasts, and blogs, and more importantly, we were shown that if it was something that we had an interest in, we could easily go home and practice on our own to better familiarize ourselves with these skills.

I was also glad we were required to attend different panels during Mass Comm Week. It was good to hear people who had been in our shoes a few years ago speak about where multimedia journalism had taken them. I was glad I got to hear Angela Grant say that a lot of the skills she learned, were learned on the job. Its nice to know that the buzzer doesn't go off upon graduation. That isn't all the time you have allotted to learn what you're gonna need to know for the future.

For the most part, I'm still not sure what I want to do once I graduate, but I can say that after taking this course, I have a better idea. Thats more than I can say for any other classes I've taken. So no, I don't have it all figured out yet, but I'm okay with that.