Compassion International

I've found myself and my peers during school projects saying to ourselves "How is this project even relevant?" "What is this project even going to teach us?" I am happy to say that for once I feel like a project my professor has assigned me not only will teach me a lot about the course, but will make a difference. In my Multimedia: Image and Hypertext class with Professor Murray at TCU, he came up with the brilliant idea of teaching us more about image collaging by assigning us to make an image board  of the famine currently going on in Eastern Africa. We will display these boards around campus with donation boxes in hopes to not only raise awareness, but money and food to help these children and families in Africa. If all teachers in campuses across the nation thought to do this, we all could make a huge difference.

Currently in Eastern Africa, the Shabab Islamist insurgent group is blocking starving people from fleeing the country and setting up cantonment camp where they are imprisoning displaced people who were trying to escape Shabab territory. Through this, a famine has been created and tens of thousands of Somalis are already dead and more than 500,000 children are on the brink of starvation.

Part of our assignment was to find a credible non-governmental organization that is sponsoring this relief.  Immediately, I thought of Compassion International which is an organization I have been part of for several years now. Compassion Internal sponsors childern in these third world countries who need help. I have been sponsoring a young girl named Neydelin in Peru since I was in 8th grade. I give her $30 dollars a month and we exchange letters. If we can find more organizations who are credible and making this large of a difference to donate the donations we raise from an assignment, we can make a change. I am excited to see what our class raises through this project and the impact we make.

Multimedia Class

With the stress of signing up for college classes, I frantically was looking for a class that I wouldn't have to dread taking and would actually enjoy. I came across Multimedia: Image and Hypertext and liked what I read. I've always been interested in computers but would not categorize myself as "tech savvy." Being that I am an Advertising and Public Relations major, having skills such as Photoshop, Indesign, etc are essential to have. I worked for a marketing agency this summer in Dallas called RAPP and saw first hand how a lot of these programs were used for huge advertising campaigns. I was the "operations intern" so I did a lot more of event planning and account executive work, but I was always envious of the creative and copyright interns who were always coming up with amazing designs and playing around on photoshop,m while I was bored doing ROI's. With social media growing and the fact that more and more people are becoming reliant on technology, having just a basic knowledge of multimedia can put anyone one step ahead. I feel grateful to be taking this class and am excited to see what skills I will have obtained by the end of the semester.