My 1st Semester of TV Broadcasting at NAIT, and life and such.


I’ve officially finished my first semester of television broadcasting at NAIT! It’s this semester that is to blame for my lack of blogging the past three months. From eight hours in school each day to homework, group meetings, group projects, volunteering and spending time with my boyfriend (that takes up a lot of time), the past three months have set the record for the least amount of time I’ve spent on free-time/online hobby activities. My fansites have gone untouched, un-updated, barely even looked at, and as I wrote above, the blog posts have taken a serious toll as well. Not even that but I completely missed the last season of So You Think You Can Dance! Which is a HUGE deal… or at least was, considering how in love with the show I was a couple months ago.

My blog post listing the Top 20 of Season 6 was the extent of my involvement with the show this season. I blame it again on my busy first semester at NAIT, as well as the Fall slot the show moved into. Speaking of which, their ratings for the Fall SYTYCD were so poor that they are moving the show back to the Summer. Seriously. I could have told them that moving it to the Fall would not equate to a jump in viewership.

But anyway, back to my semester of television broadcast studying!

Here is a brief (I say brief as I write this now but I’m sure by the end it will be anything but brief) summary of highlights of the past couple months:

  • Studio Production Class
  • By far the most hands-on class of the semester. After a few terrifyingly boring weeks of theory and note-taking, this class took a great turn into practicality. Each week we did several rotations of different television station duties. I learned how to use a TV control room switcher, be director of a “show”, be a news anchor, an interview host, and a sports anchor (I didn’t get to the entertainment anchor rotation though, darn). I learned how to select clips and superimpose names onto the TV screen. I learned how to set up and use television studio-caliber cameras and hook up lavalier microphones on anchors. I learned how to floor direct and be a production assistant, counting down to ends of clips and more. It was a really great learning experience and it really broadened my horizons in terms of duties that I’d be interested in (or good at) doing at a television station other than be on-camera.

  • Group project successes and nightmares
  • Before heading to NAIT I had heard a lot about how NAIT “prepares you for the real world.” Their big thing is that you do a lot of group work because learning to work with people that you might not agree with all the time, is a great way to gain real-life experience and prepare you for co-workers who you might not agree with, but will have to work with, in the future. Now if you’ve come to know anything about the kind of person I am based on my blog posts, you will know that I am an overachiever. Well, I am an achiever. I do not get bad grades in school because I just don’t like that. I like being praised for good work and I like showing both classmates and teachers/people above me, that I can do quality work and deliver something more than exceptional. If I am in a group, I tend to take charge and I will pick up the slack if other group members are not doing their part, because I do not want to end up with a failing project.

    Anyway, the past few months I had to do a lot of group work. Some of them smaller, like pairs or groups of three, which had always proven to be fine. But near the end there were a few bigger group projects that required groups of six and were weighted a lot, and required a lot of out-of-class time to meet and plan and work. Long story short, in the end my group projects did receive good marks and it all worked out in the end, but there were many times during the process where I really wanted to just shoot people. It was hard. I took up a lot of slack for many things and I saw sides of my classmates who were otherwise great people, that I didn’t like. It was definitely a learning experience because now I really know the people that I would like to work with on future group projects, and the people that I would definitely steer clear from because even though they are great people, they are just not great group members.

  • The NAIT Nugget Newspaper
  • I made one blog post before with some of the articles I’ve written for NAIT’s student newspaper The Nugget. I have meant to add more but now I’ve gotten so behind I’m not sure if I’ll have time to catch up on posting them all up because I have written quite a few articles for the paper this semester. (The whole, having my own technology column that requires me to write at least one article per week helped with that). Anyway as the semester came to a close, and the current editors (who were all/mostly third semester radio and TV students) prepared to head off to their internships, the editor-in-chief started looking for editor replacements for next semester. So you are now looking at the Assistant Issues Editor for The Nugget! :D (I don’t know why they don’t just call the section “News” instead of “Issues”, I am going to ask the editor-in-chief that at the next meeting…) Anyway I’m pretty stoked. I had wanted to be Assistant Entertainment Editor (because I have done so much news/issues writing in the last two and a half years that I really wanted to steer my experience towards the entertainment spectrum now), but oh well, assistant issues editor more than suffices. I get paid (not fantastic, but better than what I made with a couple articles a month). And I get to put this on my resume! (Important! ;)) So that should be fun. Should be interesting to see how I handle the new-found responsibility.

  • STAR Awards
  • So in the Radio & Television Program there is something called “Star Awards” at the end of each semester. Since the program does have both Fall and Winter intakes, that means at the end of each semester there is a batch of students that are leaving for their internships/leaving the program forever, so Star Awards acts as a kind of last hurrah for those that are leaving. For this semester’s Star Awards, I had put myself down as volunteer. I wanted to be Star Awards host, to be honest. The slots open for volunteers for first semester were “hosts” or “opening skit organizers” so I just put myself down for both and I ended up being picked to organize the opening skit. I was pretty bummed that I hadn’t been picked as a host but whatever I got over it fairly quickly and tried to rise to the skit organizing occasion. My friend Nicole and I, along with a classmate Garit (who I guess I would also say is my friend, lol) were all skit organizers and we decided that an opening musical would be a fantastic idea. Little did we know that our class would not be up for participating. Yeah. Star Awards organizing ended up being one of the biggest hassles of my semester. We started with a good chunk of the class being interested in being in the musical, down to 10. And that was including us three organizers, so really, only 7 of our classmates were interested in helping us out. There was endless music issues it seemed, a lot of low morale, people not wanting to rehearse on certain days or at certain times or for certain amount of times, and there just seemed to be a general negative vibe associated with the whole musical. It was really stressful and quite depressing honestly. There were at least two times where I seriously considered going up to the teacher organizer and telling him that the musical/skit was just NOT working.

    In the end the 10 of us did pull through and delivered a choreographed and sung-out skit/musical that, while there were a few screwups, ended up being a lot of fun to perform and a lot of fun to watch over again.

    Star Awards itself was interesting too. It got me really pumped up to make some TV commercials and be TV anchor and produce some stuff so that I could win some awards for my Star Awards (which will be next December). There was also a goodbye montage/video for both the radio and television classes that were departing on their internships and that made me really sad. I can’t believe that my first semester is already finished and there are only two more until I’m off to who knows where for my internship…

  • My Boyfriend
  • I know you might be rolling your eyes or saying, “Are you serious?” that “My Boyfriend” would get his own little block of summary, but he does.

    Michael Brown is a radio student in the same classes as me at NAIT. That is, as you might have deduced, how we met.

    The last three months with him have changed my life.

    As I said at the very start of this blog, the last three months have set the record for the least amount of time I’ve spent online doing just free-time, fansite-updating, stuff and honestly, he is the cause of it. When I’m not doing school work, I’m spending time with him. I do school work even when I’m with him actually, I like to think I am a major reason why he did well on his midterms and finals this semester. ;) Ha ha. But really.. like I said at the end of the Star Awards graph, it’s hard to believe the first semester is already over and not just because the first semester of my TV broadcast schooling has ended, but because that means it’s that much closer to when Mike and I are going to have to split off and do our internships. Mike knows he needs to go and do his radio internship at a small radio station in a small town somewhere. If you’ve been following my blog posts, you know that I want is to go to Toronto or California or somewhere spectacular and try and struggle to make it big there. Or at least that is what I did want. I used to tell people that it’s probably better you don’t have a boyfriend when you’re trying to make big life decisions because you end up making the decisions based on what’s convenient for him, and not yourself. Honestly at this point, I mean who knows if we will even make it past the summer, but at this very point right now (at 8:43 PM on Christmas Day as I write this, as he is playing video games on his bed right next to me), I want to go wherever he goes. Or I want him to go wherever I go. I want to take whatever path that ensures that we are going to be together. And again, you might be saying “Are you serious?”, after only three months?

    And I would say to you, Yeah.

    So it is sad, thinking that the semester is already over, and we’ve only got two more where we’re in school with each other before it’s time to make some seriously hard decisions that will change our lives forever.

    Whatever happens, I can firmly say that Mike Brown has changed my life.

    Remember, oh people who follow my blog, when I didn’t get The Best Job In The World? I said, You know what, I probably didn’t get it because I’m not supposed to spend the next 6 months in Australia because otherwise I would be missing something better that’s happening here. You know what that ‘something better’ was? Him.

SO that’s that. That was my semester give or take a lot of details but you get the jist of it. I learned a lot, I met great people, and I had a lot of fun!! I hear that next semester TV is CRAAAZY!!!! There is a LOT of out-of-class time invested into projects and assignments and apparently students literally pull all-nighters editing videos. But I am excited. Just, if this first semester made it nearly impossible for me to update my websites, I don’t know what next semester is going to mean for my sites! Ah!

Anyway, I will for sure putting up a year-end review kind of blog post before the New Year. I’ll also try and post up some more of the articles I wrote for The Nugget this past semester too, so stay tuned!

Linda

3 Comments

  • Heather says:

    Wow…! I wouldn’t be surprised if you said that you barely slept that past three months! You’re constantly on the go! Glad you’re enjoying it, though! That’s important! 8D

    Quick question for you about domain names as a fellow web designer. I already have a domain (one to host small fan sites I create – suffering as well because of school LOL), but I was thinking of getting another domain name to display articles, etc. – are the domain names for your SYTYCD fan sites and this one hosted on the same account or are they on completely separate accounts?

  • Linda Hoang says:

    Haha aw school work > fansites. Sad truth. The domain names for all of my sites are under different accounts which, now that I think about it, is kind of dumb because I could just put them all under one account and save a whole lot of money… hm. LOL

  • Heather Skinner says:

    Haha – it’s so true! I kept thinking during the holiday, “I should work on my fansites!” but it’s never happened! Too many things to accomplish! NOES.

    LOL It’s not cheap at all to even have one domain but it’s so worth it when it comes to fansites and portfolios!

    Oh! And before I forget – have a happy New Year Linda! 8D

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