Track down those professors!

Since registration has ended and you might not have gotten into some courses you had wanted to take, I'd like to pass on the advice of Professor Griffith: track down those professors and beg them to add an extra seat in their class because you're super interested in topic X. It's what I did to get into Media and American Politics with Professor Mindich and I am so glad that I took the extra step. It's a course that has provided the topic for many of my blog posts (ie. here, here, here, here, here, here and here), caused my current obsession with the NY Times and The New Yorker and allowed me to experience American politics live through the New Hampshire field trip.

We just learned about the engagement "young people" have with news and politics by reading a number of studies including Prof Mindich's Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News, a 2007 Harvard study on "Young People and News" and Jack Gierzynski's Saving American Elections: A Diagnosis and Prescription for a Healthier Democracy. Since I was the "designated reader" for the Tuned Out reading (which means that I had to write a 2-3 page reflection on the reading and come up with a question for the class), I decided to conduct this very unscientific survey to find out more about the role of culture and social norms in my friends' (and whoever-else-decided-to-take-the-survey's) news consumption.

Another assignment we had was to write a short paper on young people's engagement with politics and news through new media (ie. the Internet, its social networking platforms, etc.) I wrote my paper through a European lens, since the studies I found were by the European CivicWeb initiative (which I discovered through my global communications summer course in London) and this article from the University of Amsterdam.

So, since I haven't written too much about my academic life at SMC - there you are! If you're going to be at SMC in 2015, I'd really encourage saving space for this class in the fall semester since it's only taught once every 4 years and it's freakin' awesome. (Yes, I've started using American expressions.) Gabbi's written a synopsis of the class here.