UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Four Penn State College of Communications students earned real-world experience this spring by participating in COMM 494A News Practicum, a class that produces stories for the Centre Daily Times.
Members of the class during the spring semester were Samantha DiGioia, Thomas Kopania, Alexa Lewis and Jaime Rosenberg.
John Dillon, the Norman Eberly Professor of Practice in Journalism, has led the hands-on course, which is intended to run like a small newsroom, every semester since its inception in the spring semester of 2010. He selects students based on recommendations from other faculty members, as well as an application process.
The class met once a week as a group and then on an as-needed basis. Students also had a full course load outside of the class.
“I think the object of the class had two parts,” said Dillon. “One was to offer to offer some students an opportunity to get published in a professional publication, to work under deadline pressure over a long period of time, a full semester, and then to see their work both online and in print.
“The other was to try to contribute the journalistic talents that are in the college to the community at large. The CDT has a limited staff, as most newspapers do around the country these days. So, if we have good students who can write good, informative news stories that would add to the offerings that the CDT had and expand the kinds of stories that the CDT readers can get, then that’s what we wanted to do.”
Throughout the semester, students tackled stories on a wide range of topics, including events and features, with ideas generated by Dillon, the students themselves and the CDT.
“I was so excited to hear about the partnership with John Dillon’s class when I arrived last fall,” said CDT executive editor John Boogert. “It truly is a win-win-win for the students, the CDT and our readers.”
In all, the class will have had 29 stories published in the CDT, including six stories in a four-day series about Chinese students at Penn State.
“I was pleased with the work the students did on the series about Chinese students here,” said Dillon. “One of the things journalists do is report and explain, and I think the students did that in reporting on how such a large number of Chinese students came to be here and how they live their lives while here.”
According to Lewis, a senior from Philadelphia, the class provided an internship-like opportunity.
“It’s really cool that the CDT is willing to work with students,” said Lewis, who has also written for The Daily Collegian, the Centre County Gazette and AccuWeather. “It’s a pretty awesome experience. I know being published before you graduate is really important.”
The stories on Chinese students were the most in-depth of the semester. It was a group project, with each member of the class taking on different aspects of the Chinese students’ experience at Penn State. Lewis estimated that she started her stories in February and submitted the final product in mid-April, completing nearly 11 hours of interviews in the process.
Kopania, a Holland, Pennsylvania, native, wrote nine stories in the spring. It was the first time the junior had ever been published or worked on a deadline.
“Seeing your name for the first time, being only 20 years old and writing for a real newspaper, it’s pretty surreal,” said Kopania. “You feel accomplished.”