Little did I know...

...that it is really all for me.

Today I realized that I am pursuing a career in Broadcast Journalism for myself. Not so that I may become famous, not so that I may help others, or spread the truth, or give a good name to reporters. I am doing this because deep down, I want to better myself.

I had just finished the introduction to Meridian Live, a live show where I lead into a township board's discussion by outlining the meeting's topics. Beforehand, Rob and Kayla had been joking around with me: "don't mess up," etc.

Anyone else would have taken that as a good-hearted joke, but it sent me into a downward spiral of thought and bad memories that I had only seen when anti-depressants were not flowing through my veins. It truly scared me, as the feeling of tears soon followed the memories of being treated poorly by other children during my childhood and being so shy that I would constantly hunch over, sulk my head, keep my eyes on the ground, only worry about what everyone's thinking about me at the moment, and maintain a constant, noticeable sigh.

I have come a long way in a short amount of time. Even my high school peers will remember me as the shy, awkward, quiet kid who refused to speak to many others. I hadn't the slightest bit of confidence until I forced myself to volunteer to be one of Mona Shores High School's news anchors.

From that moment on, I realized how stupid I had been, so much that I blocked out nearly every childhood memory I had up until that point. I embraced the fact that my parents have given me everything they possibly can, that I am definitely in the better looking percentile of people, and it finally clicked that I had no reason whatsoever to be sad about anything. It was all because I forced myself to be put on the spot in front of my entire high school. That was, undoubtedly, the most difficult thing I've ever had to do (and yes, I had to do it). Little did I know that outbursts of depression were right around the corner, and that I would need to be medicated for them.

Before that happened, however, I grew to an almost arrogant level of confidence for a brief period of time. Most of it was in my head, but I no longer chose to put my head down while walking the halls of Mona Shores. I looked people straight in the eye, smiled at them, waved, greeted, high-fived, hugged...I was completely changed. I say I was arrogant because I convinced myself that I was much, much better than everyone else (although I never showed it or let anyone know). It was necessary for me to do that in order to skip the few levels of confidence that I had missed out on during middle school, during which I also kept my eyes on the ground and mouth shut. Hell, I even told my mom to get me prescription sunglasses (which she did) - clearly something that I wanted to hide behind.

My computer is dying because I left my charger at HOMTV, and I have much more I need to say...this is the rough draft of this post after all...but I want to say that...

Little did I know that it is really all for me. I force myself in front of a camera because I want to be the best I can be. Depression had robbed me of my confidence for ten years and I plan on making myself enjoy as much confidence as I can for the rest of my life. By putting myself out there on that news desk in high school, I had felt better than I ever had in my life up until that point. Is it selfish that I want to pursue an honorable career for self-gain? Perhaps. But I think it's necessary; my confidence is clearly not up to par with many others, as displayed by my performance tonight on Meridian Live. I am only happy that I have been given the opportunities that I have taken thus far. I love life. I love my friends. I love people. I never thought that I would ever love any of those things. Journalism has given me confidence, and I want more of it.

Social Media Post Dos

As for me, I use Facebook, Twitter, this blog, and I plan to create a LinkedIn account soon.

Good things about Facebook for me:

• Greatly helps me stay in touch with people (which I am bad at)
• Let's me know what events are going on in Michigan, especially around MSU
• Shows me which friends are fighting and which aren't, so that I know who can hang around who (dumb girls)
• Sometimes acts as a Twitter account, like when Cracked.com or the Tosh.0 blog post something funny
• Let's me know what new hilarious videos are showing up on Youtube.

Bad things about Facebook for me:

• None

I procrastinate no matter what, and if I'm using Facebook chat to do so, then so be it. After all, I'm getting these blogs, my video, and my tweets done before class in the morning, right? (yes, it's 3:13 a.m....I am nocturnal)

When I was interviewing John, Jamie, and Brittany, John seemed to hate Twitter because he's one of the douchers who thinks it's only about what people "ate for breakfast," Jamie said a lot of people are affected badly by Facebook because it's so addictive, when Lampe's studies show there's no correlation between happiness or grades and Facebook usage, and Brittany was very positive about social media.

Social Media Post Uno

So for my third article in journalism 200, I interviewed Dr. Cliff Lampe about social media. Unfortunately, the questions weren't flowing very smoothly that day, but I still got some good information out of him.

He is clearly in favor of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and LinkedIn (I still need to make one of those), but he also gave some costs to this new technology.

For instance, he said, “some of the legitimate cautions about social media include all the things people talk about like privacy implications of posting messages on Facebook.”

Lampe said a concern of his was that there are always effects that we are unaware of until later on with any new technology. Specifically, he said he doesn’t know the “kind of the implications of keeping long lists of contacts and friends over long periods of time. In our previous history, we would let our networks decay, like when we left high school - that network would decay, and we would be embedded in a new network.”

He also mentioned people doing “typical, stupid human things,” such as posting too much or the wrong things on a Web site.

It was a relief, even though I avoid putting stupid stuff on the internet, to hear that he think things like these almost never come back to bite people later on in life.

Zombie Apocalypse pt. 2

As for the actual article I composed, it was interesting to see what's going on around campus to prepare students for an emergency even without zombie-related questions.


The inspector at MSU's police department, the dude who's in charge of the emergency management team, said he doesn't know if the officers who help out at AOP have an emergency preparedness presentation set up.


It was reassuring to hear Joe Petroff, the main emergency dude at MSU, say that we are pretty well taken care of for emergency supplies, food, and water on campus. Soon after though, I asked him the zombie question and he replied, a zombie outbreak or pandemic is hard to quantify in terms of impact, and he can’t guarantee “that bad things don’t happen when there’s an emergency.”


I wouldn't say we're totally screwed if some big disaster would happen, but I think we could all learn a little bit more and maybe replace fire drills with meetings telling us where emergency exits are or even evacuation procedures.


I would really like to see this article, or another like it, published at some point in the State News, and not just because I want people to see my awesome work. Obviously, nobody has any idea what to do around here except listen to their resident mentors, who aren't even required to be CPR certified or anything, during a disaster. Some students even said they wouldn't listen to anybody and they would just do their own thing. Seriously, if you're reading this and you go to MSU, at least sign up for emergency text-messaging.

Zombie Apocalypse pt. 1

Asking your college's police inspector what plans they have in store for a zombie outbreak is no easy task, but last week I managed to pull it off with some good results.

My first out-of-class story for journalism 200 went pretty well. I was able to interview Bill Wardwell, Inspector at MSU's police department; Joe Petroff, the main dude in charge of MSU's safety coordination; and even Ali Khan, the CDC's assistant surgeon general. I think those three guys definitely contributed to the 3.2. (Hopefully the rewrite helps out)

Considering that the grade is a 92%, I'm happy about it.

For the student interviews in this story, I asked a few guys in Snyder hall some questions, and got some pretty bad answers. Obviously nobody knew what to do in an emergency, but some of the answers I got were just stupid. My favorite, the second one I included in my article, was about how Joe Vanderstelt would go outside to watch a tornado, a monsoon, and even severe hail. I warned him that there's a chance that this could get published and to give me a better answer than that, but he didn't listen. Ah well.

I now need to make a video about this story, because it's either that or I make a video about the job market after college (boring). I'm going to hopefully get some good B-roll of zombies and building fires (via ps3) when I get home this weekend, but going home means that I'm away from my interview people. I'll have to either track down MSU kids in Muskegon or do them in the one hour gap I have between getting out of work and hitting the road for Muskegon today.

Journalism Post Dos

Round 2.

So, I am having a tough time with my second out-of-class story for Journalism 200 because nobody seems to want to help out. I emailed about 30 MSU professors Sunday night, and twenty of them replied with douchey responses. My favorite was "NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. Contact our department" (in regard to a series of attached questions if they were not available for a face-to-face interview).

Luckily, I have all of my student interviews out of the way and two interviews set for tomorrow with a person from the Collegiate Employment Research Institute, and with someone from the Alumni Career Services.

If those two don't provide me with enough information (which I am nearly positive of), I think I might switch my story to the problem of graffiti on campus, or as the artists call it, "street art."

I just found out that one of my friends is someone who does this on occasion and think it would be interesting to get their viewpoint of it. I'll have to contact someone from campus who is educated on the matter and maybe I can even get someone from local government to talk about it.

Well that just about does it for 200 words. I'm going to get my economics crap out of the way so that I'll be ready for Thursday's midterm.

The point of this post is that, unfortunately, you're going to have to do the bare minimum on a few things if you signed up for 12 summer credits. BUT, you can still do a kick-ass job on your out-of-class stories.

Journalism Post Uno

Well, it’s my first blog post in a while, and I still don’t have anything great to talk about. My apologies.

I’ll start by talking about how my journalism thing’s going, which I can describe in one word: good.

I really enjoy learning about all of it, especially because it’s an entirely different style of writing. The downside is that I write like this in other classes already, and my other professors aren’t very fond of it. For example, I was marked down a point on an essay for my war history class for having a few paragraphs that were too short. I’ll just have to get used to utilizing different things at different times.

I was very excited to get back to video editing today; although I was completely lost on the Macs in the CAS building, I was able to find a friend to help me out with navigating the new system. If only my damn budget increase for a new Macbook Pro would have gone through this past semester, I would be efficient in both Mac and PC systems right now. I’ll just have to wait for fall semester.

The 200 word requirement has just been reached, and I apologize for doing the bare minimum. Unfortunately, I took 12 credits this first summer session so this week is turning out to be the busiest of my life. The point of today is that if you’re a badass, like me, then you can totally handle 12 credits in a short (6 or 7 week?) summer session.

Until next time - which is in like ten minutes.