Taught by Professor Janet Wigglesworth, this course exposed me to the various forms of communication that may be used within the sports industry.

This course allowed me to conduct and transcribe face-to-face interviews and plug the information into a news story, produce and edit a podcast, edit various clips from the university’s shared media pool, and create a short film.

For the short film, my group member and I highlighted the JMU Intramural Flag Football Championship being held at the Bridgeforth Stadium for the first time in JMU history. The film consisted of post-game interviews and football action highlights from the game.

This course was led by Professor Andrea Martinez. It helped me familiarize myself with various public relations duties and terminologies. It was a course requirement for my former Sports Communications minor in the spring of 2025.

I took this course online over the summer and was supervised by Kevin Warner.

The practicum was a requirement of my former Sports Communication minor and I did it through Stephen Gosling Photography for the Washington Mystics. I worked 90 hours throughout the entire summer and submitted images, hours logs, and a final evaluation form from Stephen.

Instructed by Professor Jason Mollica, this course introduced me to the sports side of public relations and was a course requirement for my former Sports Communication minor.

The class consisted of discussions of real-world PR crises and different ways to handle them, writing game notes for our Fantasy Football team which we would also use to simulate a PR crisis press conference. That conference consisted of us getting a ‘fake’ scenario through our class alert the night before. The group had to then study the problem and prepare for interview questions for the class to give us in order to correctly handle the confrontation and maintain credibility to the ‘public.’

Throughout the course, we developed various types of crisis manuals, fact sheets, and ended with a PR campaign project. The links for these documents are attached below.

• Community Campaign Proposal

• Decision Process Report

• Mini Crisis Manual

• Situation Analysis Report

• PR Conference Opening Statement

• Initial Media Statement Crisis Response

• Press Conference Interview Question Prep

This course was taught by Professor Adrienne Hooker and introduced us to Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.

My group and I worked with a local nonprofit called Cats Cradle in downtown Harrisonburg, VA, to rebrand their marketing materials. These materials were used to spread brand awareness to the Harrisonburg & Rockingham communities on the services Cats Cradle offered.

This course was taught by Professor Matt Leech.

He introduced us to the basics of coding (HTML & CSS), UX design, brainstorming ideas and concepts for apps, and how to create sitemaps and wireframes for developing a website.

The final project in the course was to develop a small five-page website, which ended up being the site you are using right now. I also spent the first half of the semester developing a concept of an app called JMU Quick Queue that could help improve students' waiting in long lines at dining facilities. The in-depth details of that project are linked here.

Led by Dr. Gwyneth Mellinger, this course helped expose the students to various methods of storytelling.

Classes consisted of discussions based on what we believed qualified as good storytelling, a cohesive narrative project that is linked here, a fake news debunking project that involved us finding a claim on social media that we had to use websites to fact check, and a final source narrative project where we collected 12 different sources to back up a narrative of our choice to be hypothetically turned into any creative medium. I chose to develop a plan to create a documentary on the growth of women’s sports.

This was a basic course taught by Professor Holly Marcus.

It helped introduce many students to digital photography basics and had various units on how to photograph sports, educated us on journalism laws and rights we have as photographers, what freelancing is, and the basics of editing.

The final project for this class was to create a photo story on a topic of our choosing, which is linked here.

This course was led by Dr. Alexandra Vilela. It consisted of a lot of research-based projects that took a lot of time and effort to complete.

The main component of this course was developing a blog, which I have linked here. The blog was written in a group and consisted of developing a proposal and plan of when to post, designing the blog website from scratch using WordPress, posting and commenting on classmates’ posts by a specific deadline, and a final group evaluation of what we liked about the project and what we could have improved.

This course was led by Professor Damon Dillman. It introduced us to the basic concepts of production for both audio and video formats.

In this course, we practiced audio editing on Audacity and video editing on iMovie, creating scripts for a PSA announcement in our broadcast studio that went into the teleprompter for on-stage talent, and got directions for those working on the studio floor, created and edited a podcast, and filmed a matched-action video where we filmed a tutorial and needed to make sure cuts in editing were continuous in motion.

The final project was to create a mini short film on a topic of our choosing. My group made a satirical horror film on the Starship Delivery Robots, making kids across campus go missing. It was titled “The Night the Bots Got Hungry,” and won an award for Best Editing during the final presentation.

Led by Dr. Alexandra Vilela, this course introduced us to various copywriting projects for different creative media.

We completed these projects in groups and had simulated clients from all over the world. Every project had a creative brief and involved extensive research on the company background, values, and the specific markets their audiences were in, such as a generational cohort or condition. We chose one specific generation (ex: Gen Z or Millennial) and condition (race, gender, disability, sexuality, etc…) for every project to target our mockup advertisements to.

In the end, we composed our final projects into a singular portfolio website with WordPress, linked here. We then presented the portfolio to the class and the rationales behind each ad.

Taught by Professor Kevin Reynolds, this course consisted of a lot of readings and discussions focused on the history of media and its future. We did not make any projects, as this class was strictly focused on readings and exams, but it did force students to ask questions of “What is culture?” “How to we define []?” to engage in deep conversation.