A Monthly Publication of the NWC Communication Department

Upcoming Events

Directors' Showcase
May 2-4

Finals Week
May 9-12

Commencement
May 14

Featured Student

Kaylin Hreha

Senior

Major: Journalism

What are your goals for the future?: I'm getting married next year and moving to the small, historic town of Northfield, Minnesota. There I hope to be hired by the Northfield News as a staff writer and get to know my community better through writing for the town newspaper. I look forward to the possibility of being a community journalist and being very involved in Northfield activities.

What interesting things have you done while at NWC?:

I loved being very involved in hall activities while living on campus, and I also wrote for the Column for my three years here. Of everything I did while at NWC, I most loved getting the opportunity to be Editor-in-Chief of the Column for a year. Through that position, I got to meet many people and develop skills that will be useful in my future career. I loved getting to know the staff of the paper and enjoyed the challenge of putting together a newspaper by deadline. Everything I did with the Column has helped to prepare me to enter my career field.

What is your favorite thing about NWC?:

My favorite thing about NWC is the feeling of community. This isn't just a campus full of students and professors-- it's a neighborhood and a community. Whether we know each other by name or not, we are all Eagles, and that unites us. It isn't often that you can enter a classroom full of people you don't know and not feel left out, but here everyone is kind and welcoming and interested in each others' well-being. Northwestern College truly feels like a family, and it's comforting to know that even when we've graduated and moved away, we can always come back home.

Featured
Alumnus

Luke Kuhlman
December 2007

Degree: Public Relations

What have you been doing since graduation?

I've been busy working my way into the Minneapolis marketing industry. I started at Spyder Trap Online Marketing as part of the search and social media marketing team. I learned a lot about paid search and social media for business and had the opportunity to work on projects for clients such as Children's Hospital, Shock Doctor and WA Frost. Currently I am working at Three Deep Marketing in St. Paul as a Paid Search Account Manager developing, implementing, managing and optimizing search marketing campaigns. I recently got married to my wonderful wife, Alyssa, who is an elementary school teacher.

What advice do you have for students?

The Minneapolis job landscape has become very competitive, and a degree is simply not enough to get a job anymore. If I could go back in time and be a junior in college again, I would be applying for internships like a madman. People are doing whatever they can think of to stand out above the rest in the job market, and those who don't at least have a decent foundation of on-the-job experience tend to get tossed to the bottom of the resume pile. Also, networking is more important than ever. The more connections to working, experienced professionals you've made during college, the easier the job search will be once you graduate. Finally, your college years are supposed to be some of the best years of your life, so my advice is to enjoy these years to the very fullest!

Film festival sees record attendance

The annual Five16 Film Festival packed out Maranatha Hall on April 18 with a record attendance of 900 guests who came out in formal attire to see the work of Northwestern's student filmmakers.

Festival coordinators attribute the festival's record attendance in part to the creative grassroots marketing efforts of the NWC Productions executive staff.

Two weeks before the festival, they grabbed people's attention at chapel with a group of students dressed in formal attire handing out fliers in front of the Totino Fine Arts Center, where they had parked a bright red Ford Mustang convertible blasting a techno mix of well-known movie themes.

On April 14, the group held a flash mob in the Maranatha lobby. They rolled out the red carpet, while several dressed as movie stars such as Miley Cyrus, Miss Congeniality, Speed Racer and Shirley Temple were hounded by "paparazzi" in the lobby just before chapel.

Also, in the week leading up the festival, the event's well-known, oversized clapperboard made an appearance in several unexpected locations around campus, including in front of the rock, at the library and above the entrance to Totino.

See photos from the Five16 Film Festival as well as the creative marketing events at the festival's Facebook page.

Directors showcase pieces in studio theatre

This week in the Patsy Miller Studio Theatre, seven upper-level theatre students will be presenting Directors' Showcase, a capstone experience in theatre.

The students are part of a senior-level course in Directing that teaches the basic elements of stage directing, with an emphasis on directing in a Christian setting. For their final project, the students must direct a cast in a one-act play. The student directors reflected on the process of putting together a show from start to finish.

Junior Theatre major Liz Yoder said, "I have enjoyed the pleasure of working with talented students and also the process of learning with the fellow directors as we encounter issues and bounce ideas off of each other.

Senior Jeff Dreblow explained, "The delight of this show has been seeing my cast flesh out what I imagined when I cast them, then watching them go beyond it to surprise me with moments more brilliant than I could have imagined."

For sophomore David Warren, the best part of the process will be showing the finished work. " I want people to see my show and through it have God work in their lives. As an artist it is always hard to find where God belongs in the process, and so when I have the opportunity to praise Him with my work, I love it."

Performances will be taking place May 2-4, with four to five shows each night beginning at 7 p.m. in the studio theatre.

Murder by Midnight, directed by Alex D. Johnson (2, 4)
Sun Dried, directed by Merissa Kittleson (3, 4)
The Sniper, directed by Dan McLaughlin (3, 4)
Babel's in Arms, directed by Jeff Dreblow (2, 3)
To Bobolink, For Her Spirit, directed by Lydia Thoreen (2, 4)
The Chocolate Affair, directed by David Warren (2, 3)
Organ Recital, directed by Liz Yoder (2, 3)

Poster Session takes over atrium

The atrium of the Mel Johnson Media Center was abuzz with activity on Monday morning as students in the Communication Research Methods class presented their research projects to the large crowd of guests who attended this spring's poster session.

Each student's research dealt with a topic or question within the area of Communication. For example, junior Alexi Esco analyzed whether the amount of interaction one has through social media hinders face-to-face communication. Senior Hannah Scheffler researched whether the use of good grammar in a formal speech is perceived as more persuasive and the speaker more credible than bad grammar used in the same speech.

The event was attended by a number of Communication students and faculty as well as members of other departments on campus such as Admissions, Marketing and Communications and the library. Photos from this and past poster sessions are available on the Communication Department Facebook page.

Students, faculty serve at Second Harvest

Students and faculty from the Communication Department joined with others from the college to pack food for the hungry at Second Harvest Heartland, the Upper Midwest's largest hunger relief organization.

The effort was part the annual Day of Prayer and Service put on by the college, where, after a morning of prayer, groups from across campus spread out in the community and spend the afternoon serving their neighbors through various organizations.

Together with members from the Departments of Music and Biblical and Theological Studies, the group packed over 25 thousand pounds of food in a mere three hours.

Thank you to those who participated for your efforts in representing the college and your service to the community.

Notable Notes

Northwestern hosted its fourth semi-annual speakoff event on April 4. The winners in the Informative category were Theodore Nast (1st), Tiffany Heitz (2nd) and Hannah Lambert (3rd). The winners in Persuasive were Micah Tarter (1st), Allison Preiss (2nd) and Izzi Faletti (3rd). Click here to see photos of the finalists.

Students from the NWC Productions workshop shot and edited a documentary of the college's Race Around the Cities event on the weekend of April 16. See their completed work on YouTube.

Recent graduate Kaitlyn Cox ('10) recently accepted a position in the PR and social engagement departments of Olson.

Senior Journalism major Hannah Davis went above and beyond by puting together a resume that utilizes embedded video. Click here to view her resume. (requires Acrobat 9 or later)

Dr. Kent Kaiser has had an article entitled "Gender Dynamics in Producing News on Equality in Sports: A Dual Longitudinal Study of Title IX Reporting by Journalist Gender" accepted for publication in the International Journal of Sport Communication.

Jeanette Purcell ('09), major donor fundraiser for the Republican Party of Minnesota, spoke to NWC's Lambda Pi Eta honor society group on April 6.

Note From the Chair

Do you have a backup plan?

A few years back when I was buying a new computer for my home office, I decided that I wanted to spare myself the pain of data loss and invested in a RAID hard drive set up that continually mirrored the contents of the drive to a second backup drive. If my hard drive crashed, I could simply pull my data from the mirror drive, and a potential crisis would be averted.

Of course, when you build a fool-proof system the world soon produces a better class of fool. In my case, something went wrong that caused a chunk of the file allocation table of my main drive to get scrambled, and that scrambling was faithfully duplicated on my backup drive. Fortunately the really important stuff was backed up yet again in another location (I'm a "belt and suspenders" guy), but the crash was still painful, and now I'm even more careful about backing up.

I was remembering this painful experience last month, when what should have been a routine upgrade to the department's "Mustang" video server wound up lobotomizing the system. Students who had their worked backed up on their own portable drives weren't bitten too badly, but for some it was a painful way to learn a life lesson that is particularly valuable for people who work in media: always have a backup plan. (We plan to improve our own backup plan this summer, adding even more redundancy in the hope of making the department's video server truly bulletproof.)

Soon, we'll be saying goodbye to the class of 2011. Grads, do you have a backup plan for your life? If you've earned a degree from Northwestern College, you do. In the first quarter of 2011, employment for Americans with a college degree or higher grew by 521,000 jobs, while for those with only a high school diploma, employment fell by 318,000 jobs. It's clear that a college education significantly improves your ability to compete in the job market, even if you don't wind up working in your field of study. Why? In addition to any career-specific training you received, you've also had a broad liberal arts education that has prepared you for countless opportunities. You've learned how to learn, a vital skill in a fast-changing world. Your degree shows that you've been able to meet deadlines and satisfy the expectations of your professors, all of which is excellent preparation for the workplace.

Best of all, you've done it in an atmosphere filled with opportunities to strengthen and deepen your faith. You've not only learned how to make a living. You've learned how to live. And that's the best backup plan of all.

Doug Trouten
Chair, Communication Department