Organization

Last week, I was in New York on a media tour with the Magazine Club, so I wasn't able to do much for our capstone project. So, we met on Tuesday to regroup and get a new game plan together. Yes, we've done that before, but this time we did a major refocus. The group decided that communication was our main issue, which I agree, so they appointed me as the group leader. They said they wanted one person in charge of communication, assigning tasks to other group members and meeting with Mike, our client in this case, on a weekly basis to make sure we're on the right track. So that is my new role in the group and I am extremely comfortable with it.

I continued to try and call and e-mail Rock Bridge this week with no success. After today, I'm officially giving up, so I'm going to try and call other high school journalism departments in the area and hopefully one of them will let us talk to their students about our contest. I really don't think we're asking all that much, so hopefully somebody will respond to us before Spring Break. Ryan has been trying to call Hickman High School, so hopefully he has been having more success. We're also trying to contact the student editors of each high school publication, so we'll see if we have any success there.

The three of us also split up calling up the five journalism teachers that did respond to the survey we sent out a few weeks ago. I called Edward Medina because I've been e-mailing back and forth with him for a few weeks now. He is an extremely nice man who had some good suggestions and was reassuring about some of the things we have already decided we want this competition to be. I hope Ryan and Kate have had equal success with their teachers. He also made me an extremely generous offer--he offered up his students to do a test run this semester of our competition. I think it is a great idea and something to think about doing maybe after Spring Break. If we don't get a response from these other high schools in the area then maybe it would be worth doing a conference call with his students to see what they would be interested in. His enthusiasm has made me more enthusiastic about the prospects of the contest.

So, I think we're finally going in the right direction. It's taken us a while to get here, we know that, and we will work hard to make up for the time lost. We have to work on our communication skills and making sure we're all on the same page between the three of us and the faculty, but I think me being the group leader is a good step and I think we're moving the right direction.