Mass Communication Week Student Organizations & Campus Media Expo

By Breona Blakemore

photo by Breona Blakemore on 10/29/14

 Located on the first floor hallway of Old Main at 11:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. a variety of campus media organizations and societies provided information for Mass Communication students on the Texas State campus. I stopped at the colorful table of ladies from Women Communicators of Austin at Texas State, also known as WCA, formerly known as AWC.

The President of WCA, Chelsea Cua explained to me the purpose of the organization and its history. She informed me that “WCA encourages to build professionalism among all women in majors of Mass Communication.”  She also stated that “It’s also a good way to prep yourself for your future career, and we provide internship and networking skills, social opportunities as a way for all majors in Mass Comm and to come together and work with the professional chapter at WCA, which is our Austin chapter. We also work with UT and we work with the San Antonio college, but we are just a bunch of women who all strive and achieve success in the future.”

Women Communicators of Austin-Texas State is a student chapter that unifies all fields of communication studies for one common goal. Just recently did the organization under a name change, where they branched with the professional Austin chapter to gain a more extensive network. To contact WCA for more information about their organization and upcoming events, you can follow them on twitter @WCATxState or their wordpress blog at www.wcatexasstate.wordpress.com.

I also had the chance to stop by the Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) table. I had a chance to talk to a very interesting young lady and she informed me that “the purpose of Society of Professional Journalists is to promote and defend the First Amendment above all else, meaning that it is the cornerstone of the organization, and one of the ways the organization does this on the national level is through the Sigma Delta Chi (SDX) organization that raises money. One of the purposes of SDX is to provide funding for journalists of all kinds. . .”

The Society of Professional Journalists was founded in 1909, and no women were allowed in the organization at the time. SPJ is the only journalism organization that is allowed to lobby, and they are the most noteable journalism organization on a national level.

I had the opportunity to talk to students who visited the expo thus afternoon, and a a senior business student by the name of Anjelica Pack said she believed the expo was “pretty interesting to see how many media outlets our campus has.” While I also spoke to another senior student by the name of Lauren Straughter, and she described her expo experience as “it was cool, I never realized how many networking opportunities we really had at Texas State until now.”

photos by Breona Blakemore on 10/20/14

Breona Blakemore is a senior journalism major at Texas State University.