I Finally Have a Job!

It has been awhile since my last blog post, but I've blogged every other education related milestone since the very beginning of this blog back in 2010, so I had to get on here to let you know that after all this time, four years since I finished school, and over a year since I finished my internship, I finally have a job in what I went to school for! My Bachelor's degree has finally paid off!

Last month I applied for a marketing position at a local utilities company. I tried not to expect much, after all, I've been applying for jobs since 2017, when I "Graduated" (finished my classes) all the way through to 2019, when I got the internship necessary to get the degree, you can read about that Here.

And then since the beginning of 2020, when I finally finished that internship and got the degree, I haven't stopped looking, and applying for all kinds of jobs. From ones only vaguely related to my advertising degree, like a car dealership lot photographer, weirdly enough, I applied for a bunch of those over the years, to actual positions in real advertising agencies, from Omaha to Des Moines. I almost never heard back from any of them.

So imagine my surprise when not even a few days after I applied in Harlan, I got a call for an interview. And that interview went great! But then I didn't hear from them in over a week, long after I expected to hear from anyone, and I assumed I didn't get the job. I went from trying not to expect too much, to fully expecting way too much, and completely defeated before I'd even been rejected. 😆

By this point in my life/career/whatever I am beyond tired of my job at the grocery store. I've been working in an online shopping position since I moved back to Harlan last year, and it has been getting more and more frustrating. From the "Upgraded" electronic shopping system, that has SO many bugs, to the fact that we just do not have enough help, not just in my department, but everywhere in the store, I was just ready to be done.

So Thursday, the week after I had the interview, I had fully given up on the job, and I started making plans. I was leaving. I was starting to plan a vacation, and I wanted to be gone at least three weeks. I'm pretty much broke, but I didn't care, I wanted to get away from the store ASAP.

So I talked to my friend Rachel, the one I did the internship with, started making very tentative plans to take a train from here to Colorado to visit my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Nathan, then from Colorado to Utah to visit Rachel, and then from Utah to California to visit another friend who could potentially get me into Disneyland for free, since she works there.

I had only disclosed these plans to Rachel, and then the next morning before I left for work, I found an email, asking me to call as soon as I got the message. I had a job offer. Never have I been so happy to have my vacation plans completely ruined. 😆

I tried to quit my job at the store that very day, but neither manager I talked to wanted me to leave, so I guess I'm technically still employed there, but I just told them I'd see how things went with the new job. Maybe I can be on call or something.

My last day there was Sunday, and that morning a few of the people at work put together a little going away gift for me. It was really sweet, and totally unexpected. But I really appreciated it. I will definitely miss a lot of the people I worked with, even if I won't miss the store that much. 😆

I post more on instagram than I do anywhere else these days, so here are some more pictures you can scroll through. :)

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I don't really have much to share by way of photographs of the new job. I did take a picture of some clouds over the building the other day, so I guess that will have to do. 😆

My new job is probably going to be mostly boring office stuff that I won't be able to photograph. Or won't want to photograph, 😆but there will probably eventually be things that I might be able to take pictures of.

Part of my job in the future will be to manage the content for the local cable channels, and film events around Harlan. Most of these events will be things like city council meetings, hospital board meetings, etc, but next month we'll be covering the Shelby County Fair, so I will probably be able to take some pictures to share there. But you might have to follow me on Instagram, if you want to see them in a relatively acceptable amount of time. 😆

I will try to do updates in the future, but I make no promises. This is literally my first post of the year, and we're over halfway through June. 😆

Nishna Valley Bakery Project

As most of you probably know, my family used to run a bakery. That ended a few years back, even though my parents can't seem to give it up, and are still constantly baking for people. :p

Anyway, last semester, our final project for one of my advertising classes was to create a logo, an advertisement, and a menu for any restaurant or bakery, real or fictional. So I decided to resurrect Nishna Valley Bakery. It turned out better than I thought it would, and now I wish it still existed so they could use my stuff. :p

I did two variations for the logo, even though I only used one in the final material.

This was the ad. I decided to imagine an alternate reality where NVB never ended, and we opened up a physical location.

And this was the menu. It's probably one of the most complicated things I've put together from nothing. Everything, even the woodgrain on the plaque behind the logo, I created from nothing. I had to follow a tutorial for the woodgrain, but everything else I just made up as I went. I even drew all the pictures freehand with my mouse.

So that was the project. Do you own a bakery and need some menus? As you can see, I have baked-good-drawing-skillz to spare, so feel free to hire me for all your pie drawing needs. :p

Advertising 334 Radio & TV Ads

It has been so long since I have posted any of my school assignments! I still have quite a few that I did that I was happy enough with to want to share, and today I randomly remembered some commercials I made for my Advertising 334 class, and I decided to upload them to YouTube so I could share them with you all.

I have more assignments than these that I did for this class, but I decided to only share a couple of them. This is partly because most of the projects in that class were group projects, and I didn't feel like I had enough creative control over them for me to share the end result. Also I just didn't think that most of them turned out that great, but that could be just me being nitpicky. :p

The one project that I did completely on my own was a radio spot. It didn't turn out quite as good as I wanted, I don't think I'm the best actor, but it's fine. I thought it turned out Okay enough to share. :p Today I took it into Adobe Premeire and turned it into an actual video, so now it looks like more than just a black screen, but what I submitted to class was just the audio.



Now I'm sure you're wondering about the Hy-Vee logo that I opened this post with, that is there because of my final project. This project was another group project, but unlike a few of of the others, I felt like my partner and I really worked well together, and our project was really an equal, joint effort between the two of us.

When we were trying to come up with ideas for a final ad campaign, Toni suggested that we do one revolving around Hy-Vee catering, and since the assignment was happening around Thanksgiving and Christmas, she thought we should do a holiday campaign. The funny thing was, she had no idea at first that I actually worked there, she just thought it would be a good company to use for the project. :)

Our campaign consisted of some print/billboard materials as well, but the parts that I was most proud of were our radio and TV spots. We had so much fun with these, and I am actually happy to share them. :)



And that's all for now, I have other things from other classes to share, and I promise I'll get to them. Eventually. :p

Graduation 2017

Well, it's finally over. Mostly. I still have to do an internship before it's official, but I am finished with my classes. Last Friday and Saturday were the graduation ceremonies. I didn't get many pictures myself, I was a but busy, but I gave my dad my camera, and my friend Rachel was there and took quite a few great pictures as well.

Friday night was the convocation ceremony for the graduates in the schools of LAS, Liberal Arts & Sciences.

We all got a medal from the school to wear during the ceremony.

Advertising was the first school into Hilton Coliseum, so I was one of the first ones in.

And since we were first onto the floor, we were also the first up.

The woman on the end in black, one of the people reading our names, was actually one of my favorite teachers from 4 years ago when I first started at Iowa State! Her name is Jane Cox, and she taught my History of Theater class, before I switched majors, when I was still going for the design degree. I actually even wrote a whole blog post about her, which you can find HERE. I'm sure she didn't recognize me, I was in a class of probably hundreds, but I recognized her immediately, and it was nice to see her again.

Afterwards we tried to get some pictures.

But the lighting was not very good, so this is the best we have. :)

That was convocation. The big one was the next day. To begin, every school went to a different location to line up. We were supposed to be there by 12, and the ceremony didn't start until 1:30, so there was a lot of sitting around.

My location was the Cyclone training arena.

I rarely take selfies but I did that day.

I took a picture as we walked out on the field of Jack Trice stadium. You can see just a fraction of the people graduating here. The ceremony was huge. I think there was almost 5000 people graduating here. Little did I know, I got my cousins Shaina and Sasha in this picture, as well as Rachel.

She texted me until I saw them. :p

She also got a picture of my family all the way on the other side of the stadium.

And Dad got a picture of them. :p

He also took a picture of Jackson. :)

Here's a game for you.

It's similar to Where's Waldo, but you're trying to find me. :p

Does this help?

I am there, but good luck finding me.

This was the picture published on the school newspaper's website the next day.

That's a lot of people.

Dennis Muilenburg, CEO of Boeing, and Iowa State Alumni, gave the commencement speech.

LAS was the second school to go, so I was up rather quickly, in comparison to the whole ceremony.

We all went through a photo tent to get our picture taken by a professional photographer before we went across the stage, but they didn't tell us what the tent was beforehand. My dark sense of humor imagined something nefarious going on in there. In particular I was thinking of a scene from an episode of Doctor Who were people were lined up to enter a building in order to be "upgraded" into a Cyberman. Yes, it would not have been very funny if it had been true, but I have a weird sense of humor. :p

No one got a very good picture of me actually getting the diploma (cover) but Rachel did get a great picture of me on the giant screen over the field.

The rest of the ceremony lasted until after 5, and by the end pretty much everyone had left. I didn't want to be one of THOSE people, I didn't want to seem rude and leave just because it was more convenient, so I stayed.

I suppose I should have just left; in the end, staying got me nothing but a sunburn. :p

But a girl gave me a streamer wand to shoot confetti, so I guess that was one good thing. :p

Afterwards I took another selfie while I waited for my family.

And then we went back to grandma's for a reception.

And Rachel insisted I pose for pictures with people. :)

Shaina

Rachel

 Sasha

Alex

Shaina and Alex

 Joel

Joel and Jared

Mom and Dad

That night, after everyone had left, I found this attached to my car.

Not sure who left it there, or why I didn't notice it earlier.

Mom thought it was Joel, but I never heard for sure. :p

And that was the day! I am glad that Rachel and Dad (and Sasha with my phone) were there to get pictures, because only like 5 of these were mine. There were of course official photographers there, and I should be getting a copy of those pictures, but I don't know when those will be coming. I'll probably do another post whenever I get those pictures.

As I said before, I won't have OFFICIALLY graduated until I've done an internship, and I am currently working toward that. I'm spending my first few weeks of summer building a portfolio/website. I'm making mostly a lot of new art and taking a lot of new photos for the site. I'll probably share some of the new stuff as I create it, and I'll of course share the website when it's finished. Stay tuned!

You Go, Grandma!

Last week in one of my advertising classes, our teacher showed us a commercial by Nike as an example of a company using a commercial to put forth a strong, identifiable, brand identity, as well as market themselves to as wide a target as possible. I'd say they succeeded on both fronts very well.

Many people who know me, know I have a thing for awesome little old ladies. Not a weird thing, I just love it when little old ladies do something awesome or inspiring. This one is both. They call her the Iron Nun.



What I find the most impressive is that literally none of this was fabricated. I would have really liked the commercial, even if it was just a fictitious nun who ran marathons, but the fact that Sister Madonna Buder is an actual, real-life person who does this all the time just made me love her, and love the commercial that much more.



I was curious to learn more about her, so I searched YouTube and found some more videos about her.



This last video has a more personal interview with her, and it's one of the best. She is just such an inspiring person.



I just can't help but love her!

Broccoli Ad

Just found this random thing I made for an advertising assignment last semester. I thought I'd share it. I don't really have anything to say about it. Just enjoy, I guess. :p

Life Update Again

I know I just posted one of these a couple months ago. You wouldn't think that things would change enough that I'd feel the need to do one of these again so soon. But they have. I'm changing majors again. I'm going into advertising.

I have actually been thinking about this for a long time. When I first switched over to journalism, I was under the impression that advertising was something you went into with an art degree. I had no idea that journalism was part of the same school as advertising and PR. It wasn't until I'd gotten into the first journalism classes that it was clear that advertising was an option. But I stuck it out because I had just switched, I didn't want to do it again a few weeks later. Plus photojournalism was an option and I really did want to get into that.

Well, it's now been year and a half since I switched the first time.  I have had time to discover everything that is involved with journalism, and I have discovered that it isn't for me. I like being creative, and there isn't much there for that. I kind of figured that out in the first semester, but I stuck it out, hoping to get into photojournalism. Photojournalism is a little better, it is more fun, but there's still not much room for creativity. I was still pressing forward though. I was still working toward that goal until this semester.

This semester I took a video class. It covered both filming and editing. At first I was slightly overwhelmed. I didn't know what I was doing, and I didn't know what to film. I did like the editing though. For that class we have to have 14 minutes of content filmed and edited by the end of the semester. I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do. I put that out of my mind for the time being, and thought about the editing.

I decided that if I was going to get into journalism, I wanted to be in television news. I wanted to film and edit news packages. If I worked at a station I wouldn't have to fret over what to film, they'd just tell me. I thought this was a great idea until we had a guest speaker who showed us a reel of footage of himself and his fellow camera-persons being attacked, and people trying to smash their equipment. Even though that's not exactly the norm for them, I didn't want any of that. After that, in our next class, the teacher started talking about ad agencies hiring their own video editors instead of outsourcing. He said it was a quickly growing field. The seed was planted, and I started seriously thinking about changing, but this was right at spring break, so I decided to mull it over for a week.

Over spring break, my friends, we call ourselves the Vagabonds, got together, as we usually do when I come home. For the past few years, almost every time we get together, we've had a lip sync video contest. It stopped being an actual contest a long time ago, but we still do the videos every time just to entertain each other. I had never done a video before, I know, I'm terrible. This time, I was learning Adobe Premiere Pro, and I decided I could use the practice editing, so I got together with my cousin Shaina, and we decided to do two videos. We planned out the songs we were going to do and the clothes we were going to wear. I ordered an article of clothing for one of the videos, but it did not arrive on time, so we just did the one.

Making that video was so much fun. I really wanted to do another one, but our original idea was out until my item arrived. We were going to the zoo a couple days later, so we started brainstorming ideas for filming there, when Sasha had the brilliant idea of doing Katy Perry's Roar. We were going to the jungle, it was perfect. We shot there for two to three hours, going all over the jungle, getting all sorts of interesting shots, it was a blast. And the editing was really fun too, it was harder as you couldn't hear anything through the deafening jungle noises, but still fun.

I was going to be content with just the two videos, but two days before our Vagabond event, I hit upon the brilliant idea of filming the song Radioactive, over at the "Haunted" house across the road from home. It is a very run down property, and with the world just emerging from winter, the landscape looked very bleak. It was perfect for that apocalyptic song. Shaina was not around yet, so Jacob helped me film. We shot one long take before Shaina got there, and when she did, I had another great idea. I asked Jacob if he could be a dead body, and he happily agreed. It was awesome. Shaina was a bit weirded out by it, and did not like our suggestion that she play a body as well, but she was ok with filming it. The footage from that night turned out great, except the camera died before we had enough. We'd have to do a second shoot the next day.

The next day at work Sasha came through my line, and we were talking about the video. I jokingly asked her if she wanted to be another dead body, and she agreed immediately. No hesitation. I was thrilled. That night we all met over at the haunted house for another round of filming. Sasha was an excellent body. She kicked off one shoe for extra authenticity. It was amazing. As the sun was disappearing over the horizon we shot one last take, and, well, I won't tell you what happened with the last take, I do plan on getting these videos up on YouTube sometime, and you can see for yourselves what happened.

The videos all turned out really great for my first try. I had never done one before, so everyone was excited that I had even finished one. Then they were even more surprised that I'd done two. They were absolutely shocked to find out I'd done three! I was so happy with how the videos had turned out, and so happy with the response to them, that I realized I wanted this to continue. I started thinking about the class I was taking, and was convinced by my friends that I should submit the lip sync videos as part of my 14 minutes. The teacher had said no music videos, but he'd said that to avoid getting slideshows and rave footage. My work was so much more detailed than that, I decided it was worth a shot to ask. The worst he could say was no. But he didn't. He accepted all 12 minutes of video. I was ecstatic. I have almost nothing left to do for that class.

So, I said all that to bring it all back to creativity. I loved making those videos. I had more fun with those than I've had in a long time, and I want to keep doing it. Switching to advertising will let me flex my creative muscles, and get me a lot more experience with film and editing. Eventually I'd love to make commercials, and maybe do short films on the side. If advertising is half as much fun as making videos, I know I'm going to love it.

For those of you wondering, no, this won't mean extra time in school. I'm still on track for a fall 2016 graduation. I'm at the point in the classes where everything starts to branch out. Journalism, advertising, and PR, have, up until this point, all been using the same base classes. This semester was the first semester where things started really branching apart. I am dropping one class, but the rest of it is all very useful to me as an advertising student.

I have a lot of plans to continue working on videos in my spare time this summer, and not just lip sync videos, so stay tuned! I hope to get back into blogging more than just once a month!