Student organization fair highlights opportunities for mass communication students
By Garrett McGinley
The 2017 mass communication week officially begun Monday with the student organization fair. The fair is meant to emphasize the many organizations available to students in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
These organizations all offer opportunities to network with students that hold similar interests. Some even offer hands-on work experience.
One of those organizations offering the experience of working with real clients is Bobcat Promotions. Bobcat Promotions is a student-run, for-profit public relations firm coordinated through the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Among their clients are Smoothie Warriors, a locally owned smoothie shop, and The Hitch, San Marcos’ food truck park.
Danielle Martinez, executive director of Bobcat Promotions, said the club offers “everything under the sun” relating to public relations.
Bobcat Promotions is open to all students of any major, there are no membership fees involved and meetings take place every Monday at 5 p.m. in Old Main 201.
Another organization at the fair offering real world experience is the Global News Team, which is an immersive study abroad program focusing on providing multimedia coverage of Texas State University St. David’s School of Nursing students administering healthcare in Managua, Nicaragua and the surrounding communities.
In January 2017, five mass communication students from Texas State were chosen by journalism professor Holly Wise to take part in the trip, which was the second time the organization had been to Nicaragua.
Allison Fluker, digital media innovations senior, was one of the students selected to be part of the most recent team. She outlined that the trip was two weeks and consisted of shadowing the nurses as they work.
According to their website, the Global News Team produced over 30 pieces of multimedia content and written stories on their most recent trip and were also co-recipients of the Texas State University Quarterly Team Award.
The organization is planning on returning to Nicaragua in 2018. For more information or inquiries reach out to professor Holly Wise at hlw24@txstate.edu.
For students more interested in traditional forms of media, the University Star was also at the fair. The University Star is a student-run newspaper covering news in San Marcos and the surrounding region.
“It’s the easiest resource to allocate,” Shayan Faradineh, news editor of the University Star, said. “You don’t have to have an app downloaded to your phone or a radio in your car.”
The University Star is broken down in to four distinct sections: news, lifestyle, opinion and sports. Faradineh urges anyone that wants to get involved with the University Star to email the editor of the section you’re interested in or reach out to them on social media.
“A lot of our applicants start as direct messages on Twitter,” Faradineh said.
There were more than 10 mass communication clubs that were present for the student organization fair, for more details on all the organizations that attended, visit the student media and organizations page.