Last Bittersweet Blog for J217

In the last six months I have realized a lot about myself as a journalism student. I feel that I may not be prepared for the path I've chosen. The J217 course has been the driving factor in my creating this judgment of myself as a writer.
I've realized that going down the path of an investigative reporter, or even a reporter at all, is not for me. This sad fact is even more grim, because the only reason is that I really don't care about investigative reporting. There's nothing wrong with this fact, but it does kind of bum me out. But, I just can't for the life of me imagine writing about money and people who are much less important in this world than they like to think for the rest of my life.

I attend, in my opinion, a fine scholastic institution. I feel that I didn't gain as much as I should've from this class, not because the course didn't offer anything, but because I simply wasn't that into spending weeks on end studying a budget and poking holes in an entirely functioning school foundation. I did, however learn a whole buttload of information on the history and function of journalism. Erin Foote Marlowe is a great teacher and without her guidance and enthusiasm I'm sure I would've dropped J217 the first day.
I do love journalism, but even as a child I wanted to write for National Geographic, or Rolling Stone, or Thrasher, not The New Yorker. I don't want to do the investigative reporting thing ever again, mainly because it offers me nothing intellectually. Or at least it's not very fun.
I would rather write about all the cool shit that will stoke people out than write about budgets and parking space at COCC. I want to care about at least one of my accomplishments in life, and I know that won't happen working in newspapers my entire life.

I thoroughly enjoyed the J217 class regardless of my feelings about where I want to go next with my writing. Thanks to Mrs. Erin Marlowe as well as Lisa Lovell and Sean P., you've all been great influences and I've enjoyed sharing this class experience with you.

Over Enrollment Update

At this point in the term I believe everyone's eyes are glazed over by the thoughts of floating the river and BBQing the days away. I know that after only two consecutive terms of school, I am so intensely ready for summer, it's kind of sickening in a way.

I can't wait to skateboard for 12 hours strait without worrying once about where I'm supposed to be. I can't wait for 2 for $4 summer deals on Big Macs even though I don't eat McDonalds unless said sale is going on. I especially can't wait for warm weather every day, and over all that; I can't wait to hopelessly complain because I'm sick of summer.

The over enrollment story is looking great! Lisa, Sean, and I sat down for a good three hours today hashing out all the details and filling in the holes.

We have a lot of graphs, some which we could find already made on the COCC website. Also, we've broken all our sections up into smaller, spaced out pieces that are both easy to read through and look great on a double truck.

I might not be able to wait for summer, but at least I'll know I did great in my Investigative Reporting class!

Oh, I also can't wait for the summer Mt. Dew contest! And fishing at East Lake! And rope swinging! And warm rainy days! I can't wait for camping trips and bonfires off Skyliner! And! And! And...well you get the point, I'm kind of excited.

OvErEnRoLlMeNt is an issue:)

Seeing as Mrs. Erin Foote Marlowe wants her already burnt out J217 students to keep on blogging about how their final projects are going, here I go again in a painful attempt to sound informational.

Now that I have read the budget and better understood where COCC's money goes in and out, my next job is to gather all my information in a cohesive format to hand my project partner Lisa tomorrow afternoon.

To be honest, I'm kind of nervous for her. Justin dropped our class, which leaves us down to Lisa, Shawn, and myself. I don't know if Shawn has given her any material, but I have 18 hours to gather all of my numbers and a significant amount of words to get down on paper so that Lisa will be much better prepared to write our final story to put in the paper.

We're on the right path, we just really have to get it all together and really bang out the issue of over-enrollment on our campus.

Putting The Pieces Together

At this point in the J217 Final Project, we have completed basically all of our research and now are looking forward to kicking into our super duper efficient writing mode. My partners; Lisa, Justin, and Sean are all extremely efficient so we're all feeling great about writing the story this week and filling up that truck like nobody's business.

Justin has taken care of BAT and all the parking issues on campus, which is turning out to be a really interesting piece of our story. Lisa has ended up finding some fire code violations that Rob McDilda failed to do anything about. Then Sean, our last teammate is heading up the "Big Wig" department, getting all the dirt from the heads of COCC on what's going on behind closed doors. All four of our sections are looking solid as shit, if I do say so myself. We're definitely on the right track to making a very compelling story about the over-enrollment issues in COCC.

This week we're starting to write and edit our stories, and piecing them together cohesively in one feature story to be put on the stands for the entire summer at COCC.

There is no denying that our team is on the right track to create a really great story, but I do have my reservations. The main one that comes up is the fact that we must create a solution to this over-enrollment issue at COCC. This is really tricky because we have to do so without forming too much of a bias that will damage our credibility as writers. So we must create a solution and present it in a methodical way enough so to at least not piss the majority of our readers off. We're all great writers and great journalists, so I'm sure after our meeting today we'll be in great shape.

Budgets Are My Friend...

So this is the re-post of the first up date on the J217 final project. Last week I spent many, many hours pouring over my new best friend, the COCC 2009-10 Butdget. Yes ,the entire budget... page for page. It was great.

Ron Paradis, COCC Director of Human Resources, personally lent me his copy of the budget for the weekend so that I could take my time reading it and copying it.

I spent the entire weekend reading it and before giving it back to Mr. Paradis, Mrs. Erin Foote Marlowe sent me over to the library copy room to make a copy of the entire budget. The copy assistant was rather irritated by my request for her to immediately get up off her extremely round... stool to do something. It took about twenty minutes for her to copy the budget and bind it for me, and then I was on my way.

After spending entire days wrapped in the budget, we finally successfully tore the budget a new a*$hole. It is a pretty well accounted for budget, and it only took a week for me to feel like an utmost expert of COCC's spending of their money.

Thank you Mr. Paradis for all your help during my research. Also thank you to Erin Foote Marlowe and Eric Ercanbrack for joining me to dig deep into COCC's real efforts to deal with over-enrollment in Central Oregon.

LIES

One Push at a Time

...and I realized for the briefest of moments, that skateboarding would be the thing to save my life in the end. some men have their booze and some men have there smokes, but for me; i'll have a skateboard, thank you.