By: Madeline Zarkoski
This course was truly refreshing and one that I will always remember. I learned so many valuable skills and lessons that I will take with me into life and in my future career. I loved how we had open dialogue and could share our ideas, perspectives, and takeaways on different topics throughout the past few months.
Important Skills I Learned
The GNI readings were extremely helpful and I learned so many valuable skills that I can apply to my current life and future career. Reverse searching an image and creating a transcription through Pinpoint are two of the skills that I will take away with me. I never knew that you could search the image itself on Google, and there have been numerous times where I try different key words to bring up the image I am looking for on Google. This skill would allow me to find the different sites where an image makes an appearance, and can save so much time when searching for an image’s origins. I will definitely continue to use this skill throughout my future career. Additionally, creating a transcription through Pinpoint is something that I also never knew was possible. I spend so much time replaying audio files to transcribe quotes, and this skill can really help to save journalists time when doing this. As I continue in my career, I plan to use this skill to make my work more efficient.
Important Lessons I Learned
Throughout this course I have learned many important lessons. Two of the lessons that I will carry with me are the impacts of social media and how beneficial social media can be for business growth and success, as well as how being open and willing to listen to other viewpoints and perspectives on social media can increase knowledge and understanding. Before taking this course, I mostly thought about social media in the social aspect and posting to keep up with friends. However, I quickly learned that social media can be very beneficial for businesses. It is a great way to reach your target market and can boost the success of an action plan. Furthermore, I also learned the lesson that listening to opposing views on social media can teach a person so many things. So many people are quick to block others out who have different views, but in our class discussion we agreed that listening to other ideas can help you to understand the bigger picture better.
Course’s Impact on My Future Career and Life
This course left a very large impact on my future career and life in general. In the short term, it inspired me to become more passionate about the possibilities associated with social media. It motivated me to become one of the social media producers for the Centre County Report. This course led me to become interested in benefits of social media for businesses, like boosting engagement and creating content that connects your audience to your organization. I now enjoy being creative and posting content on the CCR social media platforms to help share the news and get people more interested in our show. I think that this passion for social media is going to carry on into my future career. I will take all of the lessons and skills that I learned with me in my journalism career and utilize them to become a better journalist.
Overall Reflection
Overall, this course was one of my most memorable courses. Dr.Z helped to connect this course to our lives and what we are passionate about. After every class we would talk about our takeaways, and it helped to connect the course materials to our daily lives. The open dialogue and group-work helped me to build lasting relationships with my classmates and learn from what they had to share. The presentations about social media trends helped to increase my knowledge about the current social media world and keep things very relevant. All in all, this was an amazing course and I am so grateful to have learned the ideas from Dr. Z and my classmates in COMM 498!