This past Friday I was given the opportunity to attend the Publication Meeting at the Communication's Department. I was given a publication schedule, which I have never seen before, and even for an outsider it was overwhelming. What was kind of fun for me was to see my name on the schedule for a couple of projects. While there I was actually given a new project, to write the next OWU postcard. The postcards are sent to potential students and feature a current student so my assignment was to interview the boy they had already chosen. If all goes well, they've asked me to do the rest of the postcards this year. I am waiting to hear on who I will be working with this week. The only person I've observed so far is one of the computer graphics people which was interesting, but very out of my element, so I'm excited to see what's next.

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My first few weeks with the Communication's Department have been fun, stressful and challenging. About two and a half weeks ago, Pam e-mailed me that they would like to have me write a couple of stories for the Spring alumni magazine. The articles were to be about 300 words and my two topics were: 1)Mary Howard and her involvement with the screening of "Once in Afghanistan" at The Strand and also her own documentary which recently was screened in Columbus called "Swept Out" 2)The EPA grant that the Ohio Five, including OWU of course, received for 2009-2010 which is allowing the schools to better and further current environmental management systems.

My deadline for both stories was this past Wednesday, February 4th and I am very proud of both of them. Being an English major and never having set foot in a Journalism classroom, I was seriously worried if I would be able to write in the style and rhetoric that Pam and her colleagues were expecting. Pam was very helpful in getting background information for me which helped tremendously in preparing for my interviews with Mary Howard and Jann Ichida. The interviews went better than I ever could've imagined; both women were extremely open, allowed me as much time as I wanted to speak with them (which was about an hour in both cases), and gave me more information than I could fit into three 300 page articles.

Well, the plethora of information I just mentioned that I was given made sitting down and actually writing the articles a rather long and tedious task. I picked out the things I found most important, most relevant to the stories and pieced them together a million different ways before I was able to find something that flowed. In the end, I was over my word count by about 100 on each article, but after much editing decided that the people in the Communications Department were probably much better judges of what was essential and what wasn't for their publication.