I must say I was a little underwhelmed with Mass Comm Week. Don’t get me wrong, I believe it is an absolutely wonderful event for students and faculty alike to share their love of the communication fields and media. I never had these sort of resources in my previous university, nor do I believe they do much of anything like this for any of their departments.

However, the seminars and speakers I attended did not speak to my interests so much as I’d thought. I firstly went to the student organization expo with my students (free stuff = fun) and learned about a few student organizations that I didn’t know we had. For example, I’ve been to the Social Media Club, but didn’t realize how much they actually interact with businesses and help them with the basics of social media use.

I attended a lecture the same day with TXST alumna Trisha Espinosa, who is a programmer for BET. The talk, though titled something like “Hispanics and Latinos in Media,” did not once bring up Hispanic media, culture, etc. The only relative topic was how they choose actors with different ethnicity, if any. A few other materials had labeled this talk something more general, “Fulfilling your potential.” The topic did not interest me, since I am neither interested in television, nor much of a TV viewer.

I did want to attend one of the lectures by David Brindley, but was unable. Print media is my primary interest and National Geographic is a prominent fixture of the print world. I was also sad to miss the panel about the flood coverage, since I was involved covering the flood as well. I thought it would be interesting to hear the experiences of the other panelists, what sort of stories they came up with or what angles they took. But again, the timing was bad.

The Careers in Web Development panel was interesting because I know little about careers in web development, but the more I heard about it the more sure I was that I don’t want to go that route. I find it interesting and exciting that most of the panelists expressed that there has been a rise of female programmers in the field, as well as how they said there is an abundance of jobs in the field.

While it would be nice to have that sort of freedom in the job market, I think I would be miserable sitting in front of a computer all day looking at code.

Maybe what I should be taking away from this is that I am able to definitively check off areas of interest from my list of career possibilities.

Striking certain occupations from my career interests