Work samples are a great and important thing to have with you when going to job interviews.  Work samples show off your talents and also show employers that you have experience in certain fields.  In addition, work samples show the company that you can do more than just the basic job requirements.  I know that I have several work samples that I can put into my portfolio.

This past summer I was able to get an internship with the company Transportation Product Sales Company (TPSC).  TPSC is a representative of twelve manufacturers of high-end electronics and power related products to the North American Railroad Industry.  During my internship I was assigned to four TPSC initiatives including:  TPSC Customer Service, TPSC Marketing Activities, TPSC Corporate Overview and Professional Sales Training, and TPSC Miscellaneous Tasks.  In each task I learned new things and contributed my skills to TPSC.  My biggest accomplishment of the internship was assisting in the creation and publishing of an electronic marketing brochure that is used by TPSC today.  I will put the marketing brochure in my portfolio because it showcases the numerous skills I possess.  This brochure is an example of my computer program proficiency.  The brochure was made using Microsoft Excel, Word, Publisher, Outlook, Inkscape, and Acrobat PDF Creator.  I was assigned additional marketing tasks such as emailing TPSC manufacturers to request their participation in a trade show marketing opportunity.  Finally, I participated in planning meetings for a new web design for ARMS.  I participated in negotiation with photographers regarding use of their photos in TPSC marketing materials.  The ARMS website can be viewed at www.armspower.com.  I know that I can put in my work samples from TPSC to show that I am skilled in certain areas as well as can work with the company.  Not only will I include the marketing brochure and the website I assisted with, but I will also include my Intern Evaluation Report.  I am including the Intern Evaluation Report because it shows in detail what I did at TPSC, who I worked with at TPSC, and how well I worked within the company.  It also includes a statement from TPSC’s Company President explaining what my charter is, how I progressed in the job, and what my potential for success is in my chosen.

I also plan to include various assignments from my classes at Lindenwood University.  One item I plan to include is an air check from Mike Wall’s radio class.  The air check shows that I have radio experience and can work in a studio.  I also want to include a few of my writing pieces.  One piece I want to include is the short film I wrote about and later I put into a script.  Including the film paper and script shows I know how to put that film idea into a real script, showing employers another example of my experience and talent.  I will also include a paper I wrote about me being a sports journalist.  Another piece I will include is a documentary entitled “Women Behind The Plate.”  These two pieces show how well I can write and also are in the field I wish to pursue: Sports Journalism or Sports PR.  The final items I want to include are the websites I designed last semester.  These websites show I can build different websites as well as be creative.

I know each of the items I’m going to include in my portfolio shows my talents and experiences I have acquired over the past few years.  Each of these items will help my employer be prepared for me when they interview me and know I am what they are looking for.

Some of the things I really enjoy include traveling, working out, competing in pageants, and spending time with friends.  I also spend time volunteering for Habitat for Humanity, the American Heart Association, and Americans with Diabetes.  Pageants and Modeling is something I’ve been doing for over 10 years now.  I love being on a stage and having all eyes on me.  I also love the hard work that goes into modeling.  It is not simply standing in front of a camera and smiling.  You must learn how to pose your body, smile with your eyes, and show the world your emotions without ever saying a word.  Through pageants I’ve gained self-confidence and now have the ability to work with young women as they embark on journey of self-confidence and self-discovery through pageants.  Competing in a pageant involves months of hard work including exercise, eating right, and staying up to date with world events and current affairs.  Waiting to hear your name called as a winner is the biggest rush one can ever experience!  The anticipation of the announcement is the most nervous feeling in the world and the biggest reward is that a crown atop your head opens doors to give back to your community.  It is through the pageants I have become involved in numerous charities.  I look forward to not only modeling and competing in pageants, but also promoting the amazing opportunities these things can give to young women everywhere.  My favorite YouTube video revolves around my passion for pageants as it is the video of my friend, Shandi Finnessy, a former Lindenwood graduate winning Miss USA.  I hope to someday have a video like this of myself but will always be proud of Shandi’s crowning moment and all the wonderful work she did during her reign!

One reason this university makes me feel right at home is I came from the small town of Willard where most people know most people.  This hometown feeling is something that for the most part I like.  Lindenwood has also always given me that feeling of a small town.  Anytime I need something I feel I’m going to my next door neighbor or best friend not a stranger.  The university has never treated me like I am just a number in a seat, as most large state public universities would do.  My sister went to the University of Missouri and to this day, almost ten years after enrolling she still spouts off her student ID number easier that her closest of friends phone numbers.  I enjoy having a personal relationship with my professors and advisors unlike my sister who sat in a room with 300 other kid.   I just love being a Lindenwood Lion and would not choose to graduate from anywhere else.

In this particular course I want to better prepare myself for the career options I want to take.  In a future career I would love to do something in sports either writing for a sports team or being a broadcaster.  If that doesn’t happen I also would love to be in public relations for a big fashion company . Both sports and fashion are to of my passions. I am hoping this course can help me prepare for those kinds of careers options in the future.

When I graduate in December I will be proud to say that I earned my degree from Lindenwood University.  This university has put me in great position to go out in the world today with my Mass Communications media management and sales with an empazies in public relations degree and succeed in my future.

A big problem with so much information on the net is that it is easy to read false information on the internet.  This potential false information is what drew me to be interested in this article in the first place.  I suffer from various illnesses that make it very important for me to have received the H1N1 vaccine and it really concerns me that others may be afraid to receive the vaccine due to false information that is being put out on these blogs.  Generation Y is more and more often receiving their information primarily from the internet and relying on the net as their sources of information for news.  Therefore, something printed on an internet blog is taken as factual information by so many in “Gen Y.”  Right now many believe the pandemic isn’t serious or that the vaccine is unsafe.  For example, there are numerous blog posts claiming the vaccine causes miscarriages.Swine flu blog misinformation

Racianellio says that the web is a great source of information but in this case is a double-edge sword because you don’t know what is good information and what is bad information.

Nearly all flu bloggers are reporting recent increases in the amount of readers viewing their sites, the bigger question is whether these blogs are contributing to the discussion within academic circles.  It is apparent that they are. Mike Coston, who runs the Avian Flu Diary, said he receives between 1,000 and 2,000 visitors a day. Coston said his visitors are “mostly government agencies and hospitals and research centers. And I think people are using my blog as a one-stop shopping place for headlines in the news, as far as the flu is concerned.”  So even though legitimate bloggers with good scientific information are fighting against bloggers who are spreading false information, the internet is being use as a significant resources within academic circles.

The impact of this issue on media is that more and more people are turning to the internet for their news sources.  Even main stream media media such as CNN, NBC, etc are starting to have “guest bloggers” to appeal to the new blogging culture that is being created.  For the first time during an illness pandemic citizens have millions of pieces of information at their fingertips with just the click of a button.  This “blogging” effect from the H1N1 certainly has changed the media landscape as news outlets must now compete with citizen led news sources and must fight to separate fact from fiction when it comes to reporting news on such important topics as the H1N1.

In addition to the Web 2.0 keynote below, Gary’s remarks on personal branding, social media, and business at FOWA, Strategic Profits, and South by Southwest gained praise from established web authorities including Kathy Sierra.  Bloggers and entrepenuers everyone began to admire him as well.  Gary has landed a seven-figure book deal with Harper Studio which was featured in “The Wall Street Journal.”

The job market is absolutely brutal right now in many areas of the country — even worse for recent graduates who have very little job experience. This isn’t helped by the fact that many career sites like LinkedIn place a heavy emphasis on past jobs and workplace connections.  Brazen Careerist is launching a social networking site for young, recent graduates that aims to close this gap and hopefully help provide more career opportunities to the younger generations!

Brazen Careerist launched over a year ago as a blog network, and has since grown to include over 1000 bloggers. Now, the site is also launching its own social network that’s centered around gen y— adults who were born from the late 70’s through the mid 90’s. Unlike LinkedIn, Brazen Careerist is trying to focus on the human side of these potential employees, offering an environment where users can share their thoughts and activities alongside their resumes.

CEO Penelope Trunk says that neither LinkedIn nor Facebook are doing a particularly good job catering to Gen Y, at least in a professional network sense, and that while there are some other sites that have tried to tackle the problem, they’ve done so by trying to cater to employers first and using them to attract a community. In contrast, Trunk says that Brazen Careerist is focusing on building a community of young workers first, and that the employers will come to them.

The site feels like a mix between Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. When you log in, you’re shown your ‘Fan Feed’ — a list of updates from the members on the site that you follow (the site uses a one-way follow system similar to Twitter, so the people you are following aren’t necessarily following you back). Updates consist of status updates, as well as comments you’ve left on blogs in the Brazen Careerist network and any blogs you write yourself.  Brazen Careerist

Your profile, which is what potential employers are likely most interested in, consists of two parts: “Ideas” and “Resume”. The Ideas section is essentially a feed of all of your status updates, comments, and other actions on the site, which gives employers a multi layered view of you as employee that they can’t get from just a resume. For example, employers might check out some blog posts you’ve written to get a taste for your writing style and the way you think.  Or they could check a movie review you’ve written or view posts about marketing in a group that you are a member of.  The Resume section, as you might expect, includes a brief personal note along with your past career highlights.

This ad is of course intended for someone of twenty-one and over. The ad has the frogs sitting on lily pads out side of a shack that is supposed be like the Midwest. They were intending it to be in the middle of nowhere because there target audience is like midwestern, average, everyday men and women. The idea of the ad was that Budweiser was smart and that if you drink Budweiser then it made you smarter. That is why they used the frogs and the middle of nowhere to make people think the frogs where getting smarter and people that live in those areas or those conditions if you drink Budweiser for you choice of beer then you will become smarter. I can think back to when they choose this ad to be played during the 1995 Super Bowl.  The Super Bowl Has the best and most funniest commercials of the year . This commercial and the series that followed it gave a huge boost to Budweiser and Anheuser-Busch in general.  Anheuser Busch Gets Boost From Frogs.  I think the original Super Bowl add is what gave the Budweiser Frogs and later the Budweiser Lizards its huge start towards its trend of being everywhere.

My favorite things about the commercial is the frogs of course the keep you laughing and the saying Bud-Wies-er. What I didn’t like about it is that I felt that it did target towards Midwestern lower class men and women and that all people that drink beer are like low class and if you drink this beer it will make you smarter when in reality everyone knows what it will do is make us lose brain cells if we drink a enough of it. This ad quickly caught so fast everyone loved it! The company that was producing had it everywhere. They had it on commercials, billboards, tee shirts, mugs, and hats. It was almost like this Budweiser ad campaign slogan had became a trend.  All around this ad was most memorable because to me because I never forgot those frogs and I still think about it today when I have a Budweiser.

The true idea of citizen journalism is for the public to use technology to capture news and distribute it via the internet or other sources to create, fact check, change media of their own or together with others.  With all the social network sites, blogs, and other internet sources it is easy to see why citizen journalism is such a large part of the media today.  In “What is Participatory Journalism”  J.D. Lasica classified citizen journalism into six different types.  1) Audience Participation:  Personal user comments attached to news stories, blogs, video from mobile phones uploaded to the internet, etc.

2) Independent news and information Websites such as the Drudge Report and Consumer Reports. The Drudge Report 3) Full Fledged Participatory News Sites:  NowPublic.com, digitialjournal.com, and ground report

4) Collaborative and contributory media sites:  Slashdot and Newsvine  5) “Thin Media”:  Email, newsletters, and mailing lists  6)  Personal broadcasting sites:  video broadcast sites such as KenRadio or any podcasts.

With the boom of the internet in the late 1990s and the early 2000s citizen journalism really began to emerge as a leading media source.  In 2001, ThemeParkInsider.com became the first online publication to win a major journalism award for a feature that was reported and written entirely by readers.  In February of 2003, iBrattleboro.com was launched in Brattleboro, VT and was one of the first citizen-written news sites in the US.  AssociatedContent.com was launched in 2004, claiming the be the “People’s Media Company” and were the first to offer compensation for those who published quality content on their site.  Since then similar news websites have launched including, WorldVoiceNews.com and AllVoices.com.  Blogging recently has also became a huge form of citizen journalism.  In fact, in 2004 during the Presidential election both the Democratic and Republican parties issued press credentials to citizen bloggers covering the conventions.  A recent trend in citizen journalism has become “hyperlocal journalism.”  This is a form of journalism where online news sites invite contributions from local residents of their subscription areas, who will often report on topics that most local conventional newspapers tend to ignore and topics that might be considered controversial.

With technology only continuing to grow and get bigger and better it’s easy to assume that citizen journalism will only continue to grow as well.  In fact citizen journalism’s future may be based off of not just the internet but also mobile phones.  Moments after 9-11 some of the first live images outside of the network news shots were those being taken on cameras and videos from phones.  Social networking is also part of the future of citizen journalism as more and more people update their statuses on facebook and “twitter” the latest happenings.  In fact during the Iranian President election protests this year twitter played a large part of reporting after foreign reports were banned.  As blogging continues to grow more and more in the 18-35 year old bracket rely on blogs as a primary news source.

I'll get my news from a Blog

No matter where technology takes us it will inevitably lead to even more public participation and citizen journalism.

I learned that he went to college for pre med and majored in philosophy with a minor in chemistry. He also went to law school where he learned to write very well. He let us know that all writing is the best form communicating. Rift spoke of how he left after college for Hollywood to later return to the Midwest working as a copywrite for ad agencies.  He also spoke of the Mike Douglas show that he wrote and the children’s shows he also wrote, both of which works he seemed very proud of.

I learned from him that each step in our life really is a learning process. He said that the university is there for us to gain knowledge and just learn more with each step you go through in life. I thought to myself,  ”I think that is what Rift must have been doing his whole life, letting others help him learn and always learning new things with each day.” I thought to myself again, that’s why he is probaly so successful.  He never stops learning. He also told us to always have fun in whatever we are doing and to remember how good we are at things.  We are not idiots so don’t let anyone think that we are. He said we always need to embrace ourself throughout school or our jobs and always know that its not going to be easy but if you have fun it makes the hard stuff better. He also let us know that when we are in school let them help us discover new things and discover things we already know.  Let our teachers open us up so that when we graduate we are open and we are ready to be ourself. After him saying these few things I knew why he has became to be such a succesful writer and such a well rounded man. He never gave up on himself, always willing to learn. He always was himself and always had fun no matter what. After the message he gave yes I heard him talk about all the numerous shows he has wrote for (Rift\’s Works) and the shows he likes now such as  The Closer and Law and Order, but the words he spoke about continuing to always strive to learn new things will stick with me the rest of my life and something I will try to do everyday.