Taking Care Of Business

With the sun shining and the busy time of finals approaching, many college students are feeling a lack of time to complete everything.

However, if a student wants to receive good grades for the end of the term, he/she must decide to prioritize what is most important to get accomplishments completed. With teachers piling on the papers, tests, stories, and quizzes, many students feel overwhelmed and unable to accomplish these goals.

Journalist students are not allowed many opportunities to get off track. To be involved in journalism, a person is constantly reporting, advertising, and researching for the next story he/she will deliver. How can a person maintain his/her focus consistent.

One good tip for students is to take advantage of writing lists. Lists benefit journalist students especially because writing a list of daily plans, homework, and meetings is a great way helping to manage his/her time. Seeing a schedule planned out for when there is free time to study or relax helps students know when to fit homework and other events in.

Another good tip is to not cram everything in at once. Whether it's allowing time to go for a run to clear the mind or watching a television show, taking small breaks in between tasks allows a person to tackle assignments with fresh eyes and a clear head.

One last tip is to remember to get enough sleep at night. Although it's the end of the year and people want to spend time with classmates, getting the right amount of sleep at night allows students to feel alert and more energetic throughout long days rather than simply going through the motions.

While receiving a lot of pressure from teachers, coaches, parents, and peers, students must remember that staying calm and balancing time evenly is the best solution to helping stay focused.

Although a person may feel frustrated, panic can take over a person's life and put him/her under additional unneeded stress.

Finishing the school year off with good grades and completed tasks can allow a person to feel great. Living a healthy lifestyle of rest and maintaining focus can allow a person to prevent stress.

So whenever you're feeling down in the dumps and like it's impossible to finish, always remember to take a deep breath and smile.

Photo Credit: Technical Significance via Creative Commons.

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Online- Useful or Deadly?

Social networks are a great way to find old friends and make new ones. Launched in February 2004, Facebook became a popular site for students to keep in contacts with relatives, classmates, and co-workers. However, recently the question arises: Just what exactly are we using social networks for today?

Fortunately, social networks can be used positively by communicating with others and promoting business. Many journalists have created MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter pages to build readers, receive feedback from others on their work, and find good top stories from posts of other readers.

One major problem people face with social networking is cyber bullying. The reason cyber bullying is so much easier and harmful is because people are more willing to say something behind the screen of a computer than they would to a person's face. There have been stories reported in the news about teens taking their own life because of cruel posts found online.

The second, possibly most serious problem we are facing is unwanted people finding us online. Many people in this world known as "creepers" or "predators" use online as a tool to hunt down victims for sexual or abusive purposes. Many of us think of these people as being old men that live alone searching for young girls, but just exactly how young are these people that are using online as a way to harm others?

The most recent story in the news that caught my eye involves a 14 year old boy who used online to successfully kill a 13 year old girl. The two had been using Facebook as a way to get to know each other and eventually decided to meet up for a date. Later, the boy brought the girl to his home, attempted rape and failed. However, the girl was found later that weekend naked near a bus stop, strangled to death. Many times we say situations like this could never occur in our own life. However, we need to understand the world today has turned brutal, scary, and unsafe.

It's a shame to think there are people using online as a tool for criminal purposes. However, not all users are bad. Many journalists have found with the switch of mass media converting from newspaper to reading material online that using social network is an essential tool in the success of promoting journalism.

What can we do to protect ourselves from something like this happening to us? There are several steps that can be taken to protecting online life of yourself and those around you. Start now by spreading the news to family, friends, and classmates so you know you are doing the best you can to protect others. Keeping online clean will help journalists today be able to expand the growth of their business, both behind and away from the computer.

Photo Credit: Safe in YourSpace

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Journalism Exchange Program at U of I

In the liberal arts college setting, a shift has been made to allow for students to get a more hands on education in the field(s) of their choice. Whether it be in a student teaching or mentoring program, or applied practicums in students medias, different majors stress the importance of getting 'real world' experience to help better prepare them for a professional career.

One state school has developed a program that focuses on giving its journalism students every possible opportunity to excel in a hands on field-experience program.

The University of Iowa's School of Journalism and Mass Communication has implemented a program called North American Environmental Journalism Project (VITAL), which is funded by the US Department of Education, to help give their journalism students a 'leg-up' on other student journalists.

This program is a negotiated exchange consortium with seven different schools from the United States, Canada and Mexico. The program allows for students to study, report on, and develop an awareness for environmental journalism, with special emphasis on water resource and water sustainability issues. The program also hopes to allow for students to gain a sense of cultural awareness and still enhancing their journalistic skills.

Members of the student exchange program focus on projects in specific areas of concern in their given geographical region. The students research these issues and then post forums in a website to share information and publish their work. Some may also work with broadcast news/production and shoot, edit, and stream video on news and campus TV stations.

With exchanges between schools on the North American continent, the goal is to promote awareness for issues going on close to home and to form a sense of community among the students involved.

The University of Iowa has chosen this program to focus on environmental journalism, but students do not have to a background in biology or environmental issues in order to participate.

This program, however, is not unique to its kind. Other small liberal arts institutions also encourage study abroad courses during the semester, or for partial semesters. But this program in particular focuses on cultivating students' abilities in a specific area to give them hands on experience for their intended profession. Getting real, hands on training makes students applying for their first jobs in a given field more attractive candidates to employers...which is the goal of any school wishing to educate students eager to enter the workforce.

Check out the YouTube clip below for more commentary about this program:

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