Editor’s Note: This is the sixth in a series of articles about students in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications completing summer internships.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.— A need to adapt her high school play because of COVID-19 restrictions introduced Jamie Nguyen to filmmaking. Four years later, the Penn State student is spending her summer in Los Angeles interning with one of the premiere production companies in the United States.
The opening weekend of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” at Bloomsburg High School was also the last; due to the pandemic, the production was cancelled. Nguyen, a senior at the time, and her friends were not ready to give up.
“I was really involved in musical theater,” she said. “It was my whole life in high school.”
Nguyen contacted her high school music teacher to see if they could organize a virtual performance. What followed was a montage of around 40 masked students social distancing, holding camcorders and smart phones and working hard to make their school play a reality.
“It was my first time working with (Adobe) Premiere,” Nguyen said. “I had eight different angles of different footage. I put it all into Premiere and that’s where it started. Ever since then, I fell in love with it.”
She took her newfound passion to Penn State. A first-generation college student, Nguyen is now a senior double majoring in film production and sociology. She is also a Schreyer Honors Scholar and Paterno Fellow.
Penn State had the energy and environment Nguyen was looking for in a college experience, she said — she thought a big school and bigger town would provide the like-minded people and professional opportunities she was seeking. But, despite the change of scenery, she said that the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications felt like home.
“The motto, ‘Big school resources. Small school feel,’ may seem cheesy, but it’s true,” she said. “Time and time again, I have had professors get to know me and care about me as a person rather than just a student.”