Media Participation Project: Mollie Higgins

For my media participation project, I wrote an article for an on campus magazine called the Campus Trainer. When I first started looking into what i wanted to do for the media participation project I really had no idea, but when I got an email about the Campus Trainer, I was intrigued and knew that I wanted to write an article for that magazine.

The Campus Trainer is all about health, beauty, and fitness which are all interesting topics that I knew I would enjoy writing about. I attended the assignment meeting where Jamie Weisssman, the editor, was discussing the topics that were going to be in the next magazine. I chose the topic what the best fitness apps are for college students. Being interested in fitness, I was excited to take this article on and learn some new things myself.  I interviewed multiple students and found that while most of the apps that people were using were similar, everyone had their own personal favorite.  It was very interesting how there is this huge fitness market available at ease through your phone and becomes a huge part of people's everyday fitness routines.

After I gathered all of my information and did my research, I finished my article and sent it Jamie. She gave me a deadline when I went to the original assignment meeting of two weeks. Working with this deadline gave me an idea of what it would be like to write for a real paper or magazine one day. I had a lot of other school work to complete that week, but it was just as important that the article was finished within this deadline. It also made me realize that there is a lot of research that goes into writing an article, no matter how much you previously know about the topic. It was a little difficult for me to get a grasp on how I wanted to format my article since it isn't as structured as a typical English paper, but once I got the hang of it, it seemed to come rather naturally.

Overall, I feel the experience gave me a little insight as to what it would be like to be a journalist in the future. I was lucky enough to write about something that I knew a little about and that interested me, but it opened up my mind to how it can be much more difficult to write an article about something you don't know much about. The assignment definitely gave me a little idea of what it will be like to have a professional job and have to communicate with others as I did with Jamie and follow deadlines. Although the article hasn't been published yet, I am looking forward to seeing it in the next addition of the Campus Trainer and seeing my first published piece!