Heat Wave!

It's going to be one heck of a week!!

Hey Guys! Happy Monday and Happy Week 9!! Remember this is the last week to drop any classes!!! I suggest you try to stick it out but if your already on bad terms in the class, then please visit Advisement ASAP to do the steps for withdrawing!

I received an email in regards to becoming a Peer-to-Peer Mentor for the Fall Quarter for the new online students! I read over the information about it, and decided I had a great interest in applying to be a part of this. Basically, the Peer-to-Peer Mentor program is to connect with the new Freshman students who are starting their degree online. As for those of you who are taking online courses, you know it's not very easy to adapt to such a big change. After being in classrooms for most of our education, and then switching to being a solely online student can bring along a lot of frustration. As part of the program, a student will be assigned a freshman student who is participating in the online degree program. For the first six weeks of the Fall quarter, I would send out an email to my assigned student to check in and see how they are doing and if they have any questions about Blackboard or just the online experience in general. After the first six weeks pass, I would transition into emailing the student every other week, just checking in again and making sure everything is going well.

I personally think this would be an awesome experience for me. I remember when I first started taking a few online courses as well as a few on campus courses, I was thinking to myself, "What am I getting myself into?" Because I was once in the shoes of these individuals, I think I could help talk to them and address all of these concerns and worries about the online environment. Even with my blog, I try to do my best to address concerns that I hear students speak about. This is part of the reason why I also engage in getting students to interview about their college experience, because others can learn from it as well. We shall see what happens though! Fingers are crossed!!







So I have to admit I was extremely frustrated this weekend. I had been working on my crisis management paper for my Public Relations class as I had mentioned. I started researching my selected topic of 9/11 and wrote about 3 pages into the paper out of the 6. So I was halfway done, right? I had such a bad feeling about the paper and was driving myself crazy. It was a moment where I felt like I was on the right path, but then the other half of me, was second guessing it. I then decided, I can't take this stress and should run it by my Professor. Well, thank goodness I did! It turned out that while I had selected a good topic, it wasn't so much public relations related. I totally ignored the fact that while public relations deals with media coverage, I lacked to concentrate on a particular person or company. Think about it this way, when Michael Jackson passed away, he was a client in the case, in which PR was hoping to elicit sympathy and acceptance. In my 9/11 case, I lacked having a client. I could have used the government, but even then my Professor thought it would be a little tough to do that.

After conversing with my Professor, I found a much better topic, the Exxon Valdez oil spill from back in March 1989. About an hour later, I had found about 8 new sources, all filled with information ranging from Public Relations issues to the strategy and action plan they implemented during the oil spill. My Professor gave me the thumbs up and thought this was an excellent topic. I never knew much about it, but after my research it was very interesting. There is also a tie to the current oil spill with BP because while BP is struggling with their cleanup efforts, they should have learned from the Exxon Valdez crisis the proper way to handle this situation. Unfortunately, they did not!!

I guess a lesson can be learned from my personal experience. If you don't feel good about a topic or about a project you already started, EMAIL or SPEAK TO YOUR PROFESSOR! I think I just saved my grade big time! LOL

Well, that's all for today! I hope you all have a successful Week 9! I'm working on getting another video edited! Just wanted to get some more video coverage over at the Bergen Campus and hoping to get some filming in at the Freshman Fest on September 1st! I'll keep everyone posted! Thanks for reading! :)