This past semester a new course was added to the roster in the Mass Media Department of Missouri State University. It was a class designed to teach basic media material that would ensure everyone entering the Mass Media programs at Missouri State would be on the same page. It would also help develop an ongoing portfolio of their work as they advance through their degree program. This class would uniform the Mass Media students’ abilities to better educate the students and demonstrate improvement as they excel in the mass media courses. The class that would prove to do all of these things and more is Fundamentals of Media Convergence, or MED 130. In this class we learned how to manage media content in useful and practical ways. This includes everything from business to pleasure and everything in between. The valuable information that was taught in this class will be applicable on many levels not only in academia, but also for real-world purposes as well.
The item that sticks out to me the most from this class was the blog that we had to maintain. Not only was this my first real blog, but also it opened me up to a whole world of useful blogs that others write as well. To me a blog was primarily something a person would keep as a sort of diary going on rants of various topics or telling people what interesting things happened in their day. Little did I know, there are many useful and intellectual blogs out there and also a large community of bloggers. I found that there were a number of political blogs as well as blogs from people who specialized in a particular field. These blogs were fascinating for me to read since they offered insight on more current topics. Sure, they were more likely to contain a bias, but for the purpose of reading someone’s educated opinion it served me well. I also explored the more personal side of blogs. In addition to me Mass Media dreams, I am an aspiring makeup artist and so it was very interesting to discover that some of my role models also had a blog that they managed religiously. In these blogs I was able to learn about venues they were working at, gain professional tips, and even learn a little about their lifestyles as makeup artists. These are all very valuable tools for future experiences working with makeup.
Maintaining a blog, however, did prove a bit challenging for me. I was typically late for our blogging assignments because I would forget about them and it really was not as easy as I had hoped. However, I can definitely appreciate a blog’s usefulness still. It was especially interesting to see how many comments I received from random bloggers as well. The topics that we blogged about apparently interested them and I would receive compliments from readers thanking me for the posts. It was neat to see how active the community of bloggers was, even for a Nobody like me. In the future I think I will continue to blog, not only to help myself but also my career. Posting on topics that interest me for the benefit of others and also networking will prove to be very useful in my career to come. Though I might want to pick up the pace and frequency of my blogs if I expect to maintain a following.
Aside from the blogs, the varied media formats we learned about prove to be very valuable already. Learning how to use videos, Prezi presentations, audio clips, and online portfolios are going to become a huge part of not only my academic career, but also my professional career. I learned that your online identity plays an enormous role in your future career in many different ways. First of all, it is important in this Information Age that possible employers are able to instantly access information about you. Seeing other student’s use of a website to feature their best works in a portfolio really struck with me and made me realize how important it was. I have built websites in the past, but it was important to see how professional they were and how put together it made them look. It made me see the necessity of stepping up my game and help me to really focus in on what I needed to do to make me dreams possible. My career ambitions include music production and audio engineering as well as makeup artistry. Both of which require some sort of professional portfolio to present. Something that really stuck out to me about these portfolios was the resumes that were attached. Even if the purpose of your website is purely to display your work, there is always the chance that the right person will see your page and immediately they will have access to a professional resume. There is always a better opportunity waiting just around the corner and with that resume readily available for employers or interested parties, it gives them a greater chance of finding you.
Being conscious of your identity online is not only important to ensure your information is out there to be received, but also to filter what that information is as well. If someone Google’s your name, it is important to know what they are going to find. Pictures of your last drunken frat party is probably not what your future employers want representing their company, and not what you should want representing yourself either. I learned that your presence online is just as important as your resume and should be treated as such. This lesson is going to stick with me and remind me to continuously filter what people will see because you never know who will be searching.
The list of skills I have learned in this class are truly too great in number. In this essay I had hoped to highlight those lessons that affected me the most in my future career and discuss them in greater detail, however, the general knowledge of media today enlightened me more than I had expected. Growing up in the Information Age may lead one to believe they are on top of the game when it comes to media sources and how to manage projects and presentations, but what this class has taught me is there is always more to learn about media. How much you choose to pay attention and use that knowledge to grow will undoubtedly determine your future.
Might as well get it out of my system.
