It’s hard to believe that two journals ago I was writing about my first week at AYA. I remember how nervous I was that whole week. Now we have completed our third week. Time has gone by so fast and I am truly not prepared to graduate from this program. I have made a lot of friends, I’ve learned a lot, and have gotten more confident with journalism and communications.
On Monday, we started our day off with our communications class. We were assigned a video that we had to make on a social issue. I chose the prompt about how young people’s capacity to be civically engaged with media or technology is hindered or limited by policy, law, or social practice. A great example of this is the TikTok ban in the US. I was very nervous about how I was going to get the video done in two days. We did not have a guest speaker for today so we had an hour to ourselves. My friends and I walked over to the sit down area between the student union and the food court. We got a lot of work done during that hour. When it was 12:00 we headed back to the room and had some delicious lunch. We then moved on to our Journalism class, we started off with a fun activity where we had to decide what vehicles we would send in each scenario of news. Right after that we had a lesson on photography.
The next day during our communications class we got paired up with a group for our final project. My group decided to do a comic strip. We then had an Annenberg alumni panel. We heard from Kalyn Mason, Devin Huynh, Kailyn Huang, Leyla Navarrete, Zolio Perez, and Troi-Lyn Moore. This panel was really great because we got to hear about their college rejections and how that heartbreaking moment led them to where they are now. Rejection is something that scares me the most. It was very comforting hearing that rejection is not the end of the world and that rejection will be there in your life to guide you to your goal. For Journalism, we all checked out cameras for our photo essay. It was so much fun exploring the camera and all the different settings it had. I am so excited to use this for my project. We then worked on our Newscast that we will be doing on Wednesday.
This week has gone by so fast. Our last day before the third week is over. For our communications class, we had our last lecture of the program. We will now be focusing on our group project now. We didn’t have a guest speaker so before we left for lunch we played bingo. The objective of the game was to find people with the given statement that was on the paper given to us. I got to meet and talk to more people that I hadn’t before. Not only that but I got to learn random facts about different people. It was a very fun activity. After that we went out to lunch at the dining hall. It was definitely better than the first time we went. We had about an hour to kill after lunch before we had to head back to the room for our journalism class. I walked over to my mom’s building because she works on campus as a payroll supervisor just a couple buildings away from ours. It was really nice seeing her and talking to her about my day.
At 12:50 I walked back over to our building. Right when journalism class started, we viewed the almost finished product of the previous newscast that was made. We then walked over to the media center. A few students were able to go into the recording studio to see the process of making the newscast. I was one of those students and it was really fun to see how everything worked. When the recordings were completed everyone squeezed into the media center and we all took a group photo. We were let out pretty early so I walked over to Coffee Bean at the Cinematic arts building to hang out for a bit.
I can’t believe next week is the last week! These three weeks have gone by in a blur. Being a part of this program has been so amazing and such a great opportunity. Can’t wait for next week!
Communicating Change 