Month of Mobile Journalism pt. 1

CameraBag is an extremely easy to use photo application for the iPhone. It uses the built-in camera on the phone to take pictures, so you don’t need any extra equipment (although lenses and flashes wouldn’t hurt), and it’s pretty cheap to buy.

The specialty of this application is to put filters on the pictures you take. There are several different ones, although some, like color cross, I can’t see anybody using for professional reasons, and others look very much the same. But there are enough different, useful filters that this application deserves a download and a look.

CameraBag doesn’t require that you use the application to take the pictures, and in fact the application works better if you just take the pictures and put them on your camera roll. If you have it open when you’re shooting, each picture will open on the camera, and before you take another, you will have to click on the phone to open our camera back up. Instead, you can go out and take your pictures, then upload them to CameraBag.

Either way, once you have your picture, it’s a simple process of flicking the screen from side to side to see which filter works best for what you’re using. Helga has ended up being my favorite, but really the story would warrant the filter, if you use one at all. Once you’ve chosen, you just have to tap the save button and your picture will be saved to your camera roll, so that you can text, email or upload it like any other picture you take.

In all, the application is a pretty neat little deal. It’s certainly something you wouldn’t use every time you go into the field, but if you were working on a story that was a bit more featurey than normal, I could certainly see it coming in handy. If you do use it, it’s simple and quick, and getting the pictures off your phone is virtually effortless.

Month of October becomes unbearable

Hello everyone. I know I originally said that I was going to use this blog to talk about my education abroad internship and experience. And I want to. The truth of the matter, though, is that I severely underestimated this semester in terms of workload and time consumption. As such, I'm going to have to devote the majority of my time next month to working on my capstone project so that I can graduate. That's not to say that I'm not going to be continuing with my internship, I am, but it's going to be in a mitigated role. It will consist more of sitting in on advisement appointments and helping the guys organize the students by making spreadsheets for them, because that's really all I have time for.

In that light, I thought it might be interesting for some of you to see what all I'm doing with my Mobile Journalism Tools capstone project. Essentially, we're testing out tons of equipment, writing reviews for them, and them putting them online. Each week I'll be posting a review I've done, so that you can get a feel for how we do it here at Mizzou. I'm going to call it Month of Mobile Journalism. I hope that you enjoy!

As far as the internship is concerned, I'm learning lots. There's just so much to wrap my head around, and it seems like they work at 100 miles an hour every second of every day. Still, they laugh a lot, and the atmosphere is light, so I can't complain really. Just looking forward to helping out with some of the big orientations. I feel like that's going to be the most useful. I wish I could go to NAFSA this year, but I doubt I could swing missing three days of school for an education abroad conference. Sad days. Still haven't told the parents really about my future change of plans. I'm sure that's going to be a fun conversation.

Yay, glad I'm thinking about that now...

Internship heats up

Things are really starting to get interesting. I'm noticing more and more how much they need me over there in that office. It's not that I'm just doing menial labor, like they can't think of anything for me to do, so they just set me to a random task. This is stuff they would have to be doing, and frankly, I'm not sure when they would find time to do it. No, I'm taking a lot of heat off of them.

But that's not the interesting part. I contacted the ISC to discuss the Health and Safety Orientation, and I discovered that they would rather just pass the materials to me and let me go. So I'm going to be giving this presentation mostly on my own. It's a little bit nerve-wracking, because this is a pretty important orientation, but it's also very, very exciting. I'm taking the lead on this, and nobody seems to doubt or mind that I'm going after it. I just hope that I'll be able to manage it.

Something that's been on my mind, and I've suddenly started discussing it with other people. I think I may stay an extra semester. John and Kip have told me that they will continue letting me work with them. And I could work full time to put some money in my bank for when I do go. But I DO need to go. I don't enjoy pushing this date back, because a little part of me is afraid that now, it's going to keep getting pushed, but I have to believe I'm going to go. If I don't, I know in 20 years it will be the single greatest regret of my life.

Parent Visits

Not much on the internship front this week again (I'm promised that things get more interesting next week) so I'm going to blog about something else instead. Parent's Weekend!

It's a little bit of a tradition for my parents to come visit me on Parent's Weekend. I know that usually it's just the freshmen that have anyone come visit them, but it also has to be said that most students here get the opportunity to go home more than twice a semester. There have been some semesters where I only had the chance to go home once. So this is their chance to get out of the city for a weekend and see me.

Lame as it may be, I quite enjoy it when they come up. We always go out to eat as soon as they get here, we always go to the comedian the school has lined up. And we always go to the football game, which is always a blow-out over a no name school (although Miami-Ohio is slightly more memorable than some past games).

This year, my aunt and older brother traveled with them (it was the first time my brother had ever been up here) and my cousin and her two kids came over to see me as well for the game and dinner afterword. It was, in a word, lovely. And it made me remember why I live such a charmed life.

My family is amazing. There are over 50 family members (that I can name and see at least somewhat regularly) who live within 20-30 minutes of my house in Dallas (with the exception of my grandma, aunt and cousin, who live 2 hours away in East Texas). We're all very tight, we have massive family game nights, we look out for each others' kids, we have big garage sales, we help each other move in to new houses. It's something I've always missed since I moved to Missouri. It's quite difficult to leave such a tight-knit community and travel "afar". But looking from the outside, I've seen what I had. The best thing I can compare it to is realizing I loved my home state. It was only after I got to Missouri I realized Texas was the best state in the Union (I may be a bit biased).

And, with the realization that it's still such a heavy toll to live so far away comes another, more grievous one. I'm planning on moving to New Zealand in less than a year. Probably about half a year. There aren't any spring and summer breaks in the real world. There won't be any going home to visit. It's going to be one of the harder things I think I'll ever have to do in my entire life, to live so far away from that connection for so long. Skype is a wonderful tool, but it's still artificial, and I doubt that anyone can disagree with me when I say that face to face contact contains so much more in the way of communication and emotion.

When I leave, I'll be opening a gulf between myself and my family. Not one of anger or dissapointment, but literally a gulf. Of all the things weighing on my mind about my decision, that is the greatest. And it's the one I'm the least decided on. Good thing I have all the time in the world to work it out...

reality

I'm going to take a little break from writing about my internship to discuss something somewhat related.

I've been working two jobs this semester, and I worked over the summer. The point of adding these hours of work is to build enough capital that I can present the New Zealand government with bank statements that prove I have the capability to support myself when I come overseas. From talking to the embassy, I was given the impression I would need about 4,200 dollars.

Four weeks into the semester, I'm actually on track to be close. Luckily for me, my birthday is in late November, I'm graduating in December, and I have a very large, fairly generous family, which means that I'll be getting one last big monetary push. All of this amounts to the fact that I think I can actually accomplish the impossible, which is to build enough money to go overseas.

I think until now, telling everyone I'm moving back to New Zealand was more of just a case of telling people something enough times that I actually started to believe it too. But it seemed like there were so any obstacles that, if I took the time to really think about it, I didn't honestly believe it. Here I am now, though, set to graduate, with a real opportunity to go, and enough money to do it. Which means I actually have to make a choice.

I could stay in Columbia, which would mean I wouldn't have to find a subleaser for the spring semester. I could continue working the TA lab, and get about 20 hours a week, plus work one or two other jobs. My parents would continue paying for the apartment until the end of that semester, and I could continue my internship for another semester. And on paper, that probably looks like the better way to go.

But on the other hand, I could go now. I could go, and I could really reach for the stars. If everything works out, then I make my parents spend less money, and I get to the end goal faster than before. But that course of action has a far greater risk, which is that i don't get a permanent job, I get shipped back tothe US, and I'm stuck here.

So what do I do, take the safe route, or really shoot for the moon...

Networking

I've spoken before about the importance of networking for anyone working in education abroad. This past week I had the opportunity to experience it first hand.

A friend I had met while overseas who attends the University of Northern Iowa contacted me to let me know that a teacher we had bother had was at her university. More importantly, he was there promoting Auckland University of Technology.

What's important here is that he is a well known proponent of both the Maori people as well as a promotional man for AUT. But someho, Mizzou hadn't heard that he was going to be in the US this week. I should have remembered from my own class with him that he does this once a year, but I had flat out forgotten.

Of course I whipped out the trusty iPhone and immediately oppened facebook. No, I didn't call him. No I didn't scramble to find a computer and email him. Instead I facebook messaged him from my mobile phone. I suppose the convergence journalist in me *cough capstone team cough* coming out.

First I contact him telling him I hadn't known he was in the US, but that he should make a trip to Mizzou to give a brown bag lunch. Then I took the idea to my bosses once I'd made contact and proposed the idea to them. Of course they loved it, especially since it's so hard to get people from such a remote place in the world to visit the Midwest. I felt a certain thrill as it started coming together, as the plan formed in my head. This is what this job is all about, and here I am in the thick of it. It was all the ruch of sprinting out on assignment as a journalist without any of that technical stuff like reporting. I suppose as I get better at this job, I'll do more reporting than I am now, researching schools, interviewing possible allies, that sort of thing. But right now, just tasting it, it was a prety fun experience.

Now to sit back and see if he responds and comes here. I suppose it would be a job well done if I manage to bring such a big name to Mizzou.

Meat and Greet

The week went by unnaturally slowly, and I was called in for all sorts of menial tasks to the Study Abroad Office. I sat in on some advisement, worked out changes to fliers they needed, and now I'm in charge of sussing out a google calendar for the office. They were going to teach me how to fill out Chinese Visa Applications, which would have been a valuable experience, but the program start date hadn't been completely negotiated yet, so that was a no go.

However, I understand that sometimes, things start out slowly. I discovered I will be having actual hours in the office instead of a sort of freelance relationship I had been operating under, which makes me feel better. And talking to John, it appears that we are approaching the part of the "season" where promotion becomes the main priority. I expressed my interest in learning as much as I could about that, because I understand it's the most important part of the job. He promised me I would learn more than enough.

Even knowing all that, the week had been draining and a little bit disheartening. I felt like it was a week of this semester-long internship that hadn't really taught me much about a real world job. I was beginning to wonder why I was even wanting to do this, getting that little niggling voice in the back of my mind, the one that I got about my last career path. And then I went to the study abroad barbecue.

The barbecue today was set up and planned out to allow students from overseas and students who had gone overseas and returned to meet and catch up and just have a free lunch. I turned up with a football, and by the end of the lunch, we had a full game going on. A Bulgarian girl complained too much about us playing touch football because she felt like it limited her from gaining further yardage, and demanded we play tackle football. She was competitive to say the least.

Teaching all these foreign people American football, and telling them about restaurants they need to go to, and having them share their culture with me, it reminded me why I'm doing this. Maybe I'm not flying to Paris to meet the Director of Administrations for some University, maybe I'm not eating lunch with the dean of the journalism school in Australia tomorrow. But I'm making a REAL difference in people's lives, and I'm helping students here go out and have a unique experience. Today helped to cement, at least for the near future, the reality that I am doing something I love, and this is what I want.