Wonderful News for the Communication Minor in Me!

Remember a few months ago when I kept talking about all of the hard work I was putting into a project for my Communicatication Research and Theory class? We did a study on Muslims in the American media by gathering articles on Muslims from FOXNEWS, NPR and CNN that were on the topic of Muslims. We then ran the words of the articles through a CATPAC (it analyzes texts of words). The results that came out of it were that the news sources were not entirely unbiased in their reporting on the topic.

Last term, this project took up a lot of my time. We also had to present two presentations on our paper in front of the class, so ultimately, we had a lot invested in it. I worked on the paper along with two other students, Kelly and Alicia, who are both Communication majors. My teacher, Dr. Zaphiris, the director of the Communication department at Mercyhurst, suggested that we submit our paper to and Undergraduate Scholars Conference...so we did!

The day after we submitted it, the director of the conference e-mailed everyone who had submitted a paper and said that they were overwhelmed by the 125 papers they had received! She told us that not all of the papers would be accepted and that we should consider sending in a poster for their poster category. Unfortunately, we had not just slaved away for 10 weeks to complete a poster, so we were very upset that our chances of going to the conference just took a huge blow.

This last e-mail was in December, so the paper has been out of my mind for quite awhile. I was woken up this morning by a text from one of my group members Alicia. She said go check your e-mail, we made it to the conference!

The e-mail said "Let me be the first to congratulate you on having your paper or panel titled “Content Analysis of the Portrayal of Muslims in American Media” selected for presentation during the Undergraduate Scholars Conference April 15^th and 16^th at the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington, VA." I was SO excited!!! However, it gets better....

"Not only was your paper selected, you were rated as one of the top-four paper submitted. As such, you will be highlighted on a special panel with the other top-four papers on Saturday before the awards banquet. Congratulations on earning this unique honor."

 

WOW! So not only was our hard work accepted to the conference, we were also ranked in the top FOUR! This is so awesome because being in the top four out of 125 papers is quite an accomplishment! I can't wait to go on Monday to speak to our teacher who I know is going to be very excited and proud.

Now, here comes my plug for Mercyhurst: Our teachers truly believe in hands on experience. In all of my classes, especially in the communication department, we are taught information and then expected to perform it! Whether it is through a presentation, or a paper, or ridiculous amounts of research done on Muslims in America (just kidding, hard work pays off!), our teachers give us the necessary knowledge to then complete awesome work that we can put into our portfolio. This way, when we go out to get a job, our future employers will be wowed by the amount of experience that we already have!