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COMInte r

Nicholson School of Communication Newsletter July/August 2011

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From the Desk of Robert C. Chandler, Ph.D.

NSC Colleagues, Students, Alumni and Friends:

It is that time (again) when we embark on a new academic year. We welcome a new incoming class of students, continue to encourage our returning students on their advancing path and welcome new faculty joining us even as we say our parting farewells to those who have moved on beyond our daily company. One “new year” tradition is the making of New Year Resolutions. During the holidays in December/January, per-sonal New Year Resolutions usually focus on commitments to change lifestyles, improve one’s health behavior, enhance financial practices, career development, or set personal goals that one would strive to achieve or sustain in the coming year. Even though sometimes it is difficult to achieve each resolution, the process of re-flection, envisioning what could be and using the process as a motivational process seem to be worthwhile as well as illuminating. I have been reflecting on what sorts of commitments and resolutions could be generated on behalf of NSC. Acknowledging that each of us would probably generate an idiosyncratic list, I thought I would take the risk of articulating some themes related to our New Year Resolutions. Although it is difficult to set a precise list of New School Year resolutions, it does occur to me that we all together do have a number of commitments, goals and a vision of the direction we want to move in the coming year.

Upon reflection, first at an individual level, I would say that I want renew my own commitments (to myself and others) in several key areas. These include core commitments to provide effective administrative leadership for the NSC; work with the faculty for academic and curricular enhancements; stay the course on neces-sary budgeting and wise fiscal stewardship; seek to successfully work with the (new) COS Dean and the UCF administration to advance NSC; effectively work with our external constituents; strive to find support for faculty development; and strive to achieve two prime mission-critical goals: 1. Facilitate Excellence in NSC Academic Programs2. Facilitate Excellence in NSC Research and Scholarship

As I reflect on the larger vision for all of the NSC constituents, it occurs to me that we have already achieved so very much, overcome various challenges and have legitimate reasons to celebrate our successes. None-theless, we still have room for growth and improvement. We also enter into this new school year well aware of the fiscal and budgetary challenges facing us as a school (as well as the greater university at large). Nonethe-less, I sense that we remain firmly committed to creating and sustaining “world class” academic programs rel-evant to the mission a leading research intensive university and to our undergraduate and graduate students.

We seek to sustain and enhance the excellence in our academic programs. Our vision is to achieve and sustain a level of “comprehensive excellence” across all of our programs which encompass excellence in student learning, unique high quality co-curricular opportunities, demonstrated effective teaching and inno-vative relevant curriculum and sustained intensive high quality research. Toward these ends, we are commit-ted to engaging in curriculum review for continuous improvement. These efforts include creative exploration for new course offerings, sequences, majors/minors, certificates and graduate offerings. In this regard we are committed to a special focus on enhancing the quality and expanding our graduate program offerings as well as identifying opportunities and needs for specialized training for communication-related professionals.

We are committed to keeping our academic programs relevant and “cutting edge” in terms of research, curriculum and pedagogy. This includes emphasis on high access availability for the instructional distribution of our academic programs, including expanding our offerings through distance learning, global student ex-change, international faculty exchange and worldwide research collaboration.

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Specifically, we are committed to sustaining a curriculum reflecting the latest theory, research and applica-tions; reflecting diverse viewpoints, global in focus, relevant, innovative and available in a variety of delivery modalities including face-to-face classroom settings, mixed-mode delivery, Web-based online instruction and emerging video and streaming formats. We shall continue to emphasize the core critical mission for NSC to provide students training in the knowledge, skills and abilities necessary for career and life success in a wide range of occupations and applications including those in the applied professional communication sectors.We are committed to achieving and sustaining excellence in social scientific and scholarly research in a wide variety of focal areas in the communication disciplines. Our vision is that faculty and graduate students will engage in high level “innovative” relevant research on significant topics shaping both theory and practice globally. We have a prime commitment to securing essential external major funding for research. We are also committed to seeking widespread dissemination of the results/findings of our research in premier scholarly out-lets as well as more generally.

We seek a national and global reputation for NSC in alignment with the aspirations of UCF as a whole. “Global Brand Penetration” (GBP) is a current buzzword in both the corporate and higher education contexts. This is the kind of global brand penetration associated with widespread public recognition and perception of excel-lence. We seek a national and international reputation for our research, academic programs, and scholarship that demonstrate Nicholson School of Communication strengths, the faculty’s international-level expertise and impact of their research, and overall quality of academic programs, including our graduate programs.

We seek to make NSC-UCF as the first-choice place to study communication for undergraduate and gradu-ate students as well as a place to work, research and teach for faculty. In addition to recruiting UCF students to study in our academic programs, we want to make NSC a “destination” institution to study communica-tion – that means we want students to choose UCF as their first-choice university because they want to study in one of our NSC academic programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Likewise, we want to be an attractive school for faculty to come for research, teaching and professional growth in the discipline. We want to be a desirable “destination” school for scholars to come for career success and to achieve international research prominence. To this end, we are committed to ongoing faculty development activities and support.

We are committed to international and cultural diversity. The composition of our faculty, study body, and rep-resentative curriculum should be diverse and representative of society globally. Significant numbers of interna-tional and culturally diverse students, as well as international and culturally diverse faculty members.

We seek to be good stewards of limited resources. Recent budgetary adjustments and the realities of limited resources provide extra incentive for us to be efficient and wise in our stewardship of resources. We are com-mitted to seeking substantial external funding for our research projects. We are eager to engage with partner-ships with other academic institutions and private/public sector organizations to increase the return on our investments. We are committed to focusing on measures to achieve and sustain efficiency in our curriculum delivery without unduly sacrificing our commitment to quality. We are committed to following the models and rules implemented by the university to maximize our efficiency in terms of course offerings, student credit hour maximization, utilization of classrooms and research space, course delivery formats and strategies for faculty load assignments to ensure our continued good stewardship of resources.

Thanks for letting me share some of these observations with you all. Again, welcome or welcome back to an-other academic year with the Nicholson School of Communication.

Warmly,

Robert Chandler

Robert C. Chandler, Ph.D.Director, Nicholson School of Communication

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Student SpotlightAmerican Association of Advertising Agencies’ Multicultural Advertising Internship Program

Natalie GomezMediaMPG, New York City

Sasha DookhoPublic RelationsBarkleyKansas City, Mo.

Brittany DixonAccount ServicesAustin, Texas

Sylvana Fernandez Ad/PR &Film Broadcast Production Euro RFCG, New York City

Andrea Jones Graphic DesignDigital/Interactive DesignMcGarry Bowen, New York City

Karen AcevedoMediaUniversal McCannLos Angeles, Calif.

Andres MarmolMediaStarCom, Chicago,Ill.

Laura BatistaAcount ServicesMcCann EricksonDearborn, Mich.

Seventeen students in Jerry Sub-lette’s Argumentation and De-bate class competed in the 3rd Annual SPC 3513 Debate Tourna-ment on the Palm Bay campus on Aug. 3rd. This annual event was the culmination of a work-shop-style course which attempts to create a microcosm of the college debate world. From the outset students were divided into four teams, each of which pre-pared an affirmative case and a negative case. Students partici-pated in 12 preliminary debates leading up to the tournament, which consisted of semi-final and final rounds. Teams flipped a coin or played rock-paper-scissors to determine sides.This year’s topic was “Resolved: That the U.S. Federal Govern-ment Should Establish an Energy Policy that Substantially Reduces Dependence on Fossil Fuels in the U.S.” Issues that emerged during the debates included global warming, dependence on foreign oil, environmental

damage from oil spills, green-building, bio-fuels, and mass transit.The championship team, ABDC (Amer-ica’s Best Debate Crew) consisted of Ian Gober (senior in I/O Communication), Kim Lapan (senior in I/O Communication), Shiv Patel (senior in Busi-ness Administration), Raquel Reyes (senior in

I/O Communication), and Mark Sexton (senior in Social Science). After winning on the affirmative side in the semi-finals, the team switched sides and won 6 of 7 ballots on the negative in the final round.An individual trophy for Top Speaker was presented to Jes-sica Ratnesar (senior Business Management major).Judges for the event included Dr. Denise Young (Associate VP, Southern Region), Dr. Mike Johnson (Instructor in Education), Jim Smith (Coordinator, Student Services), Nancy Brasel (Instruc-tor in Education), Barbara Kyle (Coordinator, Student Services), Trish Sublette (mortgage offi-cer), Katie Sprayberry (UCF grad former debate student), and Shellee Hutchins (I/O Communi-cation major and former debate student).

3RD ANNUAL SPC 3513 DEBATE TOURNAMENT IS A TRADITION

Team ABDC (America’s Best Debate Crew) show off their custom-made T-shirts.

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term from the Nich-olson School. The

award was based on student satisfaction with instruction. Kunerth covers race, religion and demographics for the Orlando Sentinel.

Mark Pinsky, adjunct instructor in the Journal-ism pro-gram, won first place

for in-depth reporting from the Florida Magazine Associa-tion for his cover story, “Hell Raiser”, on former Congress-man Alan Grayson published by Orlando magazine in its September 2010 issue. The FMA presented the award at its annual conference Aug. 16-17. Pinsky, a freelance writ-er, author and former reporter for the Orlando Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times, joined the journalism faculty this fall.

Faculty Spotlight

Two NSC staff members were honored at the Annual Employee Awards Program at the UCF Arena on Aug. 16th. Mercedes Hutchin-son retired this year after 15 years of service to UCF. Jane Ingalls, Undergraduate Admissions Spe-cialist of NASSC, was honored with an award for 15 years of service to UCF.

Two NCS Staff Members Honored

Journalism instructor and area coordinator Rick Brunson re-ceived a second-place award in the annual Teaching News Terrifically competition spon-sored by the Association for Ed-ucation in Journalism and Mass Communication. The award in the national contest was for a lesson he developed for his

Journalism Instructor Wins Award for Teaching

JOU 2100 News Reporting class that teaches students how to use their smartphones as reporting tools. One of the contest judges noted that the project was “Really well thought out. Innovative. Timely. Re-sourceful.’’ The award was handed out at AEJMC’s annual convention in St. Louis in August.

Rick Brunson reporting with his smart phone aboard the Goodyear Blimp NSC Adjunct

Faculty AwardsJeff Kunerth, who teaches Metro Reporting in the Journalism pro-gram, received the Best Adjunct Instructor Award for the Fall 2010

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Alumni SpotlightVictoria Moll-Rameriez has been accepted into the NBC News Asso-ciation. Moll-Ra-meriez gradu-ated from NSC in 2009. After gaining expe-rience in the field of journal-ism by working as an Assign-ment Editor at WKMG-Local 6, she plans to

move to New York City to start the program in the fall. This highly competitive program identifies outstanding aspiring journalists who bring diverse backgrounds to news produc-tion and news coverage. The program repre-sents NBC’s strong commitment to develop a diverse editorial staff within NBC News. The News Associates program is designed to attract candidates of racial, ethnic, eco-nomic and geographical diversity, as well as candidates with disabilities. The News Associ-ates program is a fast-track opportunity for people with the goal to learn news gather-ing and production skills. It is not designed to train people who wish to be on-air reporters. Moll-Ramierez is the first UCF alumna to be accepted into this program and when asked what was most intriguing she responded “What I liked most about the program is that it is targeted to those of us who are journalists but are not interested in being on-air talent. That’s what made me pounce at the oppor-tunity.”

Spring 2011 Communication M.A.

GraduatesFrom left to right: Front: Erica Cowin, Mol-lie McLaughlin, Katie Detlefsen, Courtney Merrow Middle: Bobbie Brinkerhoff, Cara

Menzies, Ariel Baldridge Back:Ricardo Amaral, Shannon Watson, Anne

Reyers, Nicole Jackson

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Events

On Sept. 17, 2011, the Greater Orlando Heart Walk will be held at Loch Haven Park begin-ning at 7p.m. The 2011 Heart Walk is a wonderful opportunity to raise funds to help fight heart disease and strokes. Please support the College of Sciences by making a donation today! Follow this link http://greaterorlandoheartwalk.kintera.org/collegeofsciences to make a se-cure, tax-deductible online donation. The American Heart Association’s fund raising website has a minimum donation amount of $25.

The 2012 International Crisis & Risk Communication Conference: Cultivating Trust in Uncertain Times will bring together leaders, researchers and experts from private industry, government and the academy to facilitate an international dialogue about how we can collectively un-derstand, adapt and respond to the significant crisis communication challenges we face in the wake of growing skepticism, suspicion and erosion of public trust. The conference will be held at the Fairwinds Alumni Center at the University of Central Florida on March 5-7, 2012. For more information please visit www.icrcommunication.com.

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