How I celebrated National Student Employment Week

 

 

 

Today I was honored at a reception for Boston University Student Employee of the Year nominees.  I intern in the education department of the Huntington Theatre Company (a Boston University partner), which is a huge, huge organization. So it feels special just to be noticed in the first place.  But to be counted among the students that won the award at the reception today was very special. 

 

 

 

These students were exemplary employees at any age or academic level.  There were tutors, student managers, and resident advisors in the group. Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore stopped by the event to thank us for our work and share his own experiences as a student employee. The reception was a great way to begin wrapping up my internship with the Huntington, which has brought many unexpected opportunities my way.

 

The reception was also a perfect way for Boston University to acknowledge National Student Employment Week. Hopefully, you show some love to your student interns and let them know how much you appreciate their work!

Blogging on Mondays…

…I don’t see how anyone does it. I can barely remember Comcast channels to get my morning Golden Girls fix, let alone words and sentences and grammar and syntax and punctuation

 

I have some new posts planned for the week, which for me should kick in around Tuesday:

·         Ode to the Sims 2, top-selling, awesome-est video game of all time

·         Live-blogging from the ER, how I spent my Saturday night

 

I am still trying to get into the Bobby Pens groove. Every time I want to focus on PR or social and new media, Tyra Banks does something fantastic on her show. And I get the urge to write about it. I appreciate singularly focused blogs, so it keeps me on the edge of my seat when I think about the many courses this blog could run. But blogging is exciting and I’ve had so much fun starting this blog and getting involved in the Twitter-sphere (twitter.com/BobbyPens). I’m meeting awesome people and learning a lot. My next goals are to buy a domain name or two and to try my hand at website construction. Any pointers you have, I’m all ears! Seriously. Nothing but ears here, folks.

Sad, Unfortunate Truths about Communication

I once had a communications professor who told a class of undergrad and grad students some “sad, unfortunate truths” about the world of communication. Please allow me to paraphrase a few of them so you can see the exact moment my heart sank and broke into a million, tiny, disillusioned pieces:

1)  Journalism is dying at the hands of apathetic consumers
2)  People will not take you seriously if you speak with a Southern accent
3) Today’s college students are tomorrow’s illiterate fops: We can’t write worth a lick

Disheartening, right? How’s a college student supposed to enter the world with all that fresh-faced optimism when people say things like that to you?

But it’s okay. I think communications students are fighting the good fight when it comes to sifting through the mish-mosh of traditional media and new media changes that get harder to keep track of every year. There’s so many different ways our skills can be applied.

The only sad, unfortunate truth I’m seeing is that people will get left behind if they don’t learn to adapt and to grow and to maintain the same level of dignity for new media that made traditional media so effective. Even in the face of economic recession and spirit-grinding professors, it’s hard for me to feel like there’s no longer any good content to create. Or that I can’t create it.

Time Magazine says Facebook is now for old fogies…

  Time Magazine says Facebook is now for old fogies… And I’m inclined to agree with a select few of their reasons.

Because Facebook surely hasn’t appealed to the college student in me for quite some time. Maybe they want to address the needs of their fastest growing age group, but I do think they are doing so at the risk of losing favor among their loyal subjects who were there from the start.

Time Magazine’s 10 Reasons Facebook is for Old Fogies

# 4. Facebook isn’t just a social network; it’s a business network.
[These two worlds really have no place intermingling. Adults who have practice at separating their work lives from their personal lives may fit right in. But for college and high school students, this is still a new concept. We kind of feel cheated being told to not use Facebook to put our lives on display for everyone to see… that was the whole point!]

# 7. We have children. There is very little that old people enjoy more than forcing others to pay attention to pictures of their children.
[This is true. .. Whereas a lot of college students have pictures they’d rather people never saw in the first place.]

# 10. We’re not cool, and we don’t care. There was a time when it was cool to be on Facebook. That time has passed.
[I could not have said this better.]

For the complete list, click here.

I joined Facebook five years ago, within the first three months of its creation. I had attended an early college orientation and incoming freshmen were already talking about this cool “thing” called Facebook, where you could add your (one!) picture and tell people about yourself and meet other freshmen ahead of time. It was simply revolutionary.

Over the years, I watched as Facebook added new features, like photo albums (which they initially imported from Photobucket- remember?), group pages, event pages, and the earth-shattering news feed. But I’ve also watched Facebook do some strange things like invite people to create applications for the Website, then soon after push them off of a person’s main page. And let’s not even get into the “We own your information,” kerfuffle.

Look, I love Facebook. But I don’t think that the platform itself is all that’s been changed. Facebook is no longer conceptually the same as when I joined. I’m not really sure who Facebook is for anymore. (But I also can’t imagine my mother-the archetypical Fogie- having her own Facebook page.)