ksmlegend

[ksmlegend]

This is it! 

The Final Mastery Post.

After 12 challenging months, my master's program is finally finished. Over the course of my tenure in this program, I've learned many skills that enhance my abilities in the professional world. When I began this program, I had a different vision of where I'd end up at the end. I initially chose this program because I wanted to learn how to become a film critic, but quickly realized that not only is this program not geared toward that, but it would challenge me to rethink an approach to succeed. 

I would learn skills that would allow me to go into the field, conduct interviews, film, and photograph. I would learn to find what's newsworthy and why it matters to an audience. I've learned how to research topics that I would speak about and craft them into multimedia stories that would be shared across various social media sites. A crucial skill I was able to apply to all of my projects is managing my public relations as well as my reputation. 

Revisiting my New Media Journalism goal now I can see the evolution from where I started to where I want to go. Now I have a huge interest in photojournalism and covering sporting events while learning more about the people playing and why they play. I hadn't had the level of fun I did until I stepped out onto the softball fields and was capturing the action shots and the video capturing players hitting and running. My capstone assignment was a huge piece of revising this goal.

Nothing was more taxing than making sure I got all my interviews, video footage, research, photos, and distribution plan together yet thankfully to the scheduling of this program it had us start that in a timeframe that we would be able to finish it in month 11. I felt so rewarded when I shared my hard work with the coordinator and received her praise on the amount of work I put in finally came to fruition.

The final class was unexpected. I had expected that the final class would be the capstone and would be the separate class that it was but this class was all about gathering my capstone and creating a thesis paper around it. This specific course allowed me to enhance that capstone by breaking it down into an over 20-page, 4,000-word thesis paper. I was able to apply everything I learned to cite properly, format my paper professionally, and personally show myself I could take on anything.

I've shown myself that I can balance a full-time job with the USAF, the father of a seven-year-old and a one-year-old, a husband, and a full-time student in a master's program. I proved with perseverance and hard work, that anything is possible, and now with all of the things I've learned through two programs at Full Sail University, I'm ready to enter the professional world of journalism and creative writing.

[ksmlegend]

MASTERY JOURNAL

Research and Investigation Skills Development was a class I had no expectations of, just as I did for the rest of my classes. This has been my most challenging class to date. There was a real curve thrown at me when I realized I'd be drafting actual articles and doing a load of research. I was very taken aback at receiving my first assignment grade because up to this point, I'd been an A student who followed all of the requirements and everything.  It's been one of my goals to achieve a 4.0 status in my master's program because I really wanted the achievement and to show myself regardless of being a full-time active-duty member, father, and husband, that I could achieve something I've never obtained before but it now because of my lack of quality sadly, might not happen. 

Weeks two and three saw improvements in my assignments in my ability to cite my sources and properly formulate all of my evidence for the articles I wanted to create. The biggest challenge for me was getting interviews, I reached out to several potential interviewees, and none had responded, which made my assignments a real challenge but hopefully, in that process, I was able to conduct two interviews and get answers for the articles and the content I was creating. Another goal I was able to meet is to start my journey to creating a researched article with real evidence and interviews. I was able to see if this was a possible option in my career and see if I was interested in the type of work that came with being a journalist which

I believe with the skills painfully learned from this class I was able to achieve. In week four this class became clearer, as I was fine-tuning my infographic and cleaning up my draft post, I saw how gathering this info made my article a trustworthy source of information. There was support behind the numbers, links to the names, and correctly cited sources and it all clicked just how important this would all be. I also learned how to post to my website link and Twitter to that post and create a multimedia brand that flows.  I appreciate the challenge this class brought to me because it provides me an opportunity to learn and hopefully achieve academic achievement through the rest of my master's and hope this is my only B.