Week 2 Day 1
On the first day of the second week, we started our day off with a lesson on Podcasts. Today we were assigned a podcast to do in the upcoming days. I love listening to podcasts so this was so much fun to make. A social issue that I saw that was important to young people is school violence. School violence has caused students to feel unsafe in a school environment which shouldn’t be the case. School should be a place where kids can focus on learning and not have to think if they are safe or not. After our lesson, we then heard from our guest speaker Taj Frazier who is an associate professor of Communication and Director of the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment here at Annenberg. He explained his job and who he was. We watched a video from PBS “How This West Coast Dance Style Took Over America.” In the video, Taj is meeting up with a dance legend and a founder of the Krump, Marquise McCray. It was really interesting learning about the history of this dance style. This type of dance has allowed dancers to confront and get through difficult emotions and struggles they are going through at the moment. While he was presenting we ate lunch. Before we ended the day we had our journalism class. We learned what VO’s and SO’s were and what the differences were.
Week 2 Day 2
Mark Schoofs, an associate Professor of Journalism, was our guest speaker for today. He told us what an interview was and what to expect during them. He guided us through a reading and he gave us some great tips on how to correctly do interviews. I will definitely be using them in future interviews that I schedule. Interviews were something that scared me because it was really scary to think about getting rejected. But after interviewing people for my Vox pop I realized that it is normal for people to say no.
During journalism class, we did a fun activity where we did a silent interview with Karen Garcia. She was in the center of the room and we had to answer questions about her by just observing her. Then we found out that we were going to be doing an AYA newscast on Thursday in the Media Center which was very exciting.
Week 2 Day 3
Wednesday was a very unexpected day but yet so exciting. I didn’t know that we would be going on a scavenger hunt all around USC. We started off today with a lesson on Critical media literacy. There are so many concepts when it comes to different types of media. Today we did not have a guest speaker so for lunch we went to Everybody’s Kitchen at USC. Brittany and Karen had said that we had an activity for after lunch. We all had so much anticipation and wonder of what we were about to do. We were split into assigned groups. I got to talk to new people. It was quite an adventure. We got a list that had 18 places we needed to go to from the USC campus. We couldn’t split up our group to get the tasks done sooner. We all had to be in the pictures of us at each spot. The top of the list was Tommy Trojan. Everyone started running to the spot. At one point it was just one of my teammates and I because we got split up from the other three people in our team. We lost them when we were running to the statue. We found them eventually. Our team was able to get through fifteen out of the eighteen places. It was so much fun. It will definitely be an activity to never forget.
After the scavenger hunt, we all were divided into different groups to work on different scripts. In the end when they were all edited they would be just one script for Thursday.
Week 2 Day 4
I can’t believe today is the last day of our second week! We are halfway done with the program. I started off the morning with walking over to the Cinematic Arts buildings. I haven’t been able to visit that part of campus so it was really nice to look around. Then, I had Coffee Bean for the first time and it was really good. For our communication class we had a lesson on media literacy which was something I found very interesting. We then heard from our guest speaker, Joy Ofodu, a very talented voice actor. During her presentation she had so much humor and confidence showed how passionate she was about her career. She was very inspiring. I learned so much more about the acting world and what it is like now.
For our journalism class, we went into the media center. We got to record our first Newscast. It was really cool to see how things worked in the media center and see the process of recording the newscast.
This week has been so much fun! Time really does go by fast. We are halfway done with the AYA program. These two weeks have gone by so fast. This program has been such an amazing experience. I can’t wait to see what the next week has in store for us.
Resources
https://www.pbs.org/video/how-this-west-coast-dance-style-took-over-america-wu2db2/
Communicating Change 