The COMMference: A Night Celebrating Communication
Department Student Successes
It’s spring and time again for
Communication students at Truman State University to showcase another year of
their successes.
This Saturday’s event—now called
The COMMference—kicks off at 6 p.m. in the Alumni Room of the Student Union
Building and features an extended alumni panel to talk about jobs and graduate
school. Also included are a crop of current students who will review projects they
completed in various Communication courses during the past year.
These range from a presentation on Internet
regulations, the 2012 political campaigns, and photography captured during the
2012 Iowa caucuses. More than a dozen Communication students, along with
members of the co-curricular student media, traveled to Iowa in January to do
reporting, but also to complete research that began in a political
communication course during the fall semester.
Event organizers, Communication
seniors Sara Kluba and Carrie Nelson, said the event’s focus enables students new
to the discipline to see what the more senior students have accomplished in courses
such as Publication Design, Advertising, and Rhetorical Criticism, among
others. They also get to interact with former Communication students who are
now working in the fields they want to pursue in the future.
“We’re using the skills that we’ve
learned in many of our classes,” said Kluba. “We want to show others what they
can learn too and how it can be applied in the future.”
This year’s alumni panel is
comprised of five speakers who represent the variety of occupations open to Communication
majors and minors, including a public relations account executive, a magazine
editor, a television director, a communications coordinator, and a broadcast news
producer.
Representatives from the department’s
co-curricular student media (Index, Detours Magazine, News36, and KTRM—the Edge)
will be available to talk about on-campus opportunities, including positions as
writers, editors, photographers, videographers, broadcast anchors, and radio DJs.
Other department-related groups—also co-sponsors of the event—will also be on
hand to talk about their activities, including the pre-professional Advertising
and Public Relations organization, Forensics and the discipline’s honor society,
Lambda Pi Eta.
Organizers Kluba and Nelson said
they’re using the full range of their communication skills to pull off this
event. They even invited their classmates to get involved and show off their
communication skills as well. Through a social media campaign, including a Facebook
page called “YOUR name here,” they offered their fellow Communication students an
incentive if they could invent a fresh, inventive name for the event. Senior
Teresa Bradley came up with The COMMference and earned herself a gift
certificate to La Pachanga.
“By
using many different forms of social media including Facebook, Twitter and a
blog, we’ve reached a wider audience than with using only traditional media,” said
Nelson.
Kluba and Nelson,
both experienced event planners and active in many clubs within Communication
and across campus, launched a blog so students interested in event-planning,
social media and design could follow their progress. They also hired Twitter “volunteers” to
help spread the word, as well as to record and upload video clips of their
classmates talking about their favorite Communication "memory" while
at Truman, and to describe what they hope to do with their educations after
graduation.
Kluba
said she is especially interested in a professional career as an event planner,
and enjoys the hectic pace that accompanies making arrangements, scheduling
tasks, and meeting with the many people who are needed to make events run
smoothly.
“There are a lot of little things
that many do not think of that go into event planning,” said Kluba. “It is a
great feeling to know that what you are doing is all going to culminate into
something great.”
In contrast, Nelson says she gravitates
toward the creative end, spending her time designing promotional elements,
including posters, flyers, and other promotional tools such as Facebook pages
and websites.
“Working
on all aspects of a campaign from the logo to the advertising is a really
rewarding and challenging experience,” said Nelson.
The
event was first launched in spring 2011 by seniors Kelly Fox and Amanda Goeser,
who said they hoped to see this event continue to grow.
“We
wanted to do the event because communication students put a lot of time and
effort into projects, but no one get to see the fruit of their labor,” said
Fox, who now is attending Washington University as a graduate student.
Kluba
and Nelson said they hope the event will bring excitement to learning about the
Communication major and what it offers students both during and after their
time at Truman.
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