Our media professional event was in full swing on Friday (9.5.14) and personally I think it went great!
Everything started on time, the talks from everyone, including the students were fantastic and we had a fair few comments off guests saying how good they thought the day was.
We had a visit from Phil Riley, who gave us a fantastic talk on the future of radio, and how AM is basically "dead" and online is the future. He also talked briefly about FM and how he thinks that it isn't dying, so he doesn't know why they want to get rid of it just because the internet is at play.
We then had a talk off Selena Brown, who created Little Miss Sunshine. She gave a fascinating talk about how she got where she was today, and she was sat in our seats not too long ago! Which has really given myself and other students motivation to do well, in our future.
Poster presentations were next, and I didn't have anyone ask questions about mine, as there were not many people around, but it was a good chance to look at fellow students work and allow us all to see what we have all accomplished at our short time here at university.
Here is the online poster:
I then went on to do scratch radio, our usual friday show! Which you can catch up with here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gsALB-PNxg&feature=youtu.be
Then finally, I caught the last poster presentation group which again, seemed to have been a success, and I overheard some people say that they were "very impressed" with our event. They had seen nothing that went wrong, and from what they could see it ran smoothly and they had a very enjoyable day as they had not gone to anything like this before.
Of course, in everything you do you will find something that went wrong on the day, and you learn from your mistakes.
One thing I might have done differently is the organisation of groups before the event started. Not everyone knew what they were doing, and were just stood around waiting for instruction.
More of an order of the actual students could have driven us to be more enthusiastic of the day.
However overall, it was a great day, I took a lot from it, met some great people, heard some great talks and got to talk about what we think, The Future of Media is!
Personal Contribution
In contribution to the event, I put myself down for front of house. This entailed sorting out where we would have sign in desks, how we were going to sign people in, what we would need to give guests and had to discuss with signage, where everything would be. My contribution was initially coming up with ideas for those things, such as making a leaflet with the days events on, having name badges for us so they knew we were part of the team and also having some sort of cloak room. This was all then taken out of my control and given to the committee to decide what they were going to run with, and actually use for the days event.
My contribution on the day of the event was ushering. But as myself and Neal do a show on Scratch Radio, a committee member asked us if we wanted to do our usual show and have it played into the rooms at lunch where the guests were able to eat and see our presentational posters. I showcased what we could do within the facilities of our own university and allowed guests to hear us in action giving them a taste of what we can do. After the radio talk with Phil Riley, I think it was appropriate that we had that playing in the rooms, to show the future of radio. I also then went back to ushering after our show, and this ran smoothly as there were enough of us to show people to their seats and everyone seemed to know where they were going.
I also tweeted and used social media to promote the event, and also during the day. Mostly on my twitter account that you can find here:
www.twitter.com/rhimaievans