Educational Side Effects: Skills Development

Take a look at my face in this pic *gasp*

I can laugh about this experience in retrospect. At this precise moment, the teleprompter became possessed in Professor Winkler’s TV Production 1 class. I was Producer [slash] Talent A in this newscast and there was no opportunity to STOP the production and have a do-over. Luckily for me, since I wrote the copy and tweaked several times … I practically had it recited. Everything turned out okay.

Even though this is a clearly a case of things going WRONG (and this semester had plenty), unintentional learning provided some of the strongest lessons I’ll take away from these experiences. My crew encountered last minute scrambling and schedule changes because our Spring semester was Winter Wonderland and we had freak snowstorms several times. We booked equipment for an outdoor shoot on GREEN environmental initiatives, but our campus was winter WHITE. Oh, and I can’t forget the clicking sound of my hard drive going dead the day before I had to submit final edits or my SD card going wonky in the middle of a photoshoot.

What skills have I developed? RESILIANCE, PROBLEM SOLVING, PERSISTANCE, FLEXIBILITY, IMPROVISATION (and countless others). These are what I like to refer to as positive side effects from the collegiate experience.

Photo Credit: Professor Christopher Winkler, Rowan University
Date: May 2, 2018
From: The Gun Debate (Producer: Steve Nuzzo, Director: Alexander Compta)