My Semester with Aggie

As a person born right in the awkward period of time directly after the millennials, but old enough to remember a time when technology didn’t dominate life, I figured I was relatively well versed when it came to social media. I had lived to see the glory days of things such as chatrooms, Skype, Instant Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, MySpace, Snapchat and even Pinterest. I grew up for most of my early life in a technological lull. Technology was mainly used in the business and government fields, and hadn’t yet latched onto the general public. Being and individual who grew up with these social media platforms being initially released, I figured I was practically an expert. This misconception was what lead me (as well as the need for a general education filler) to enroll in the course “Principles of Social Media” at Ohio Northern University. It was in this class that I would come to know Aggie.

The first impression that I had of Dr. Aggie was “Wow this is different than an engineering faculty member!”. She was very personable and welcoming to us new students who had picked her class thinking that it would be an easy A, or for actual credit towards a PR degree. Aggie started class by stating that there was a pretty good chance that half of the class would be gone before the withdraw date set by the university. In the most bubbly and polite way possible, she told us unsuspecting students that we were going to have to work for that “A” we all wanted. The brunt of the work for this class are the blog posts that are required to be done. Every week students were to write three blogs in AP format following that guideline that one of them pertained to Public Relations or Social Media, one pertained to whatever reading assignment was given at the time of the blogs and one blog pertaining to any subject we wished to put out onto the internet. As a student sitting in class on the first day of the semester, I hadn’t even read a blog let alone written one, had never written in AP format my entire life and thought I was going to be one of the students that would be gone within the month. However, the blogs were not as horrid as I thought they were going to be. The format they were in was strange to me, but I adapted and overcame the oddity of being a presence on the internet for a grade. The end of the semester became difficult to find topics to discuss for the required 500 word minimum, which, lead to some nights of banging my head off the table trying to think of how to stretch a rant about my capstone project into 500 words. Nevertheless, I prevailed. Aggie’s blogs did not defeat me as I had predicted in the beginnings of the semester.

There were other assignments associated with the class throughout the semester. The main recurring assignment was the AP quizzes that were given once a week to ensure that we were learning at least something about the format we were trying to write in. They were kept on a level playing field though, with the quizzes always being with open access to the web for looking up the questions on the fly. If you knew how to google, or used the recommended AP Style-book website, then the quizzes were really no sweat. There were also several assignments given throughout the class that pertained to the different social media methods we were discussing in class. My personal favorite of these assignments was the Podcast assignment in which my roommate and I were tasked with leading a discussion about current or relevant events. Leading a discussion in front of a recorder is more difficult than it looks, but the experience was all together a unique one that allowed me to learn more about the topic used for the talk. The projects seem like a pain, but they are also grade savers if you aren’t doing too hot on your blogs. All together I believe Aggie built the course to help you succeed as long as you were willing to put the work in. There weren’t a lot of traditional quizzes (two based on readings and in-class discussion) and the work that you actually had to do was actually not too bad if you are good at budgeting your time and don’t procrastinate like I often did. I would also say that the class was a rewarding experience for me as a student in the engineering college. It really made me get out of my comfort zone and forced me to communicate with people who weren’t in my classes or even a similar major. It broadened my ability to establish communication with people of many different backgrounds in order to engage in meaningful conversation. That is not something that really gets focused on in the engineering curriculum, and is something that companies are really looking for currently. I will make sure that the college of engineering most definitely advocates that more students go over to the Freed Center to spend a semester with Aggie like I did. If anything it will be for their own benefit.