Well, it’s that time again for David’s week in Ottawa review!
This week started off pretty interestingly, as there was a problem with a course that I signed up for. On Mondays, I had two classes: Journalism and Society 1 and Public Affairs reporting. J&S 1 seemed like your average run-of-the-mill history course about journalism. While it seemed dry, I thought of it as a necessary evil. After that course I read two full papers, basically from cover to cover. Doesn’t my life seem thrilling?
After that, I decided to spontaneously check my e-mail, as I had about 25 minutes before my next class started. I was lucky I did, as there was an e-mail stating that every first year Masters of Journalism student must de-enroll from that class as it is a pre-requisite for the second year program! In a panic, I frantically searched for another course at the same time and located a graduate course entitled: Introduction to Environmental Politics. It was all the way across campus and I had about 5 minutes to get there….. 8 minutes later, suffering from severe chest pains, I walked into the class. It actually seems interesting, but a lot of work and reading.
Tuesday was another print bootcamp day where we went out on our first reporting assignment! We had to examine an area with only one of our sense (mine was sight). It was actually pretty informative and you start to notice interesting things, such as everyone in the food court that had a laptop was on Facebook!
On Wednesday I had my first TA office hours, which was an interesting experience. I have office hours from 1-4, and based on the e-mail issues I was receiving on a daily basis, I expected lots of people to come. I was SORELY mistaken! I sat and did readings for about 2.5 hours, when students finally started to arrive. How many students out of a class of 16 do you think visited?
10? 8?
Sorry, the correct answer is 2! They were nice 4th years, and I actually look forward to getting to know more of them.
Thursday was journalism law again….Woooohoo! It’s actually not as bad of a course as I imagined (and it’s actually the lightest workload by FAR!) Who would have thought?
Friday was another print-bootcamp, where we discussed exactly what MAKES news and the different components of a news story. And then, we were given a Carleton University press release and were told we had 30 minutes to write a lead (the first attention grabbing sentence) and as much of the actual article as we could. I actually really enjoyed that exercise, as I’ve never really done that before.
Afterward, we all decided to meet up later and I joined two other students for a bit of pre-drinking after visiting a mall so we could all pick up digital voice recorders. It was actually pretty fun, and I learned something! Vodka and Canada dry tastes pretty good! 😛
Then, we all ventured downtown to a bar called “The Brig”, where everyone else was. To be brutally honest, I felt a bit out of place there as people were all huddled together into a group with no chairs left. So, I resided to leaning in to people’s conversations and trying to participate and join in conversations as much as I could. Sadly, I had to leave much, much, much earlier than everyone else because I had to catch a bus and I didn’t want what happened last week to occur again!
I caught the bus, but my connecting bus wasn’t running!!!!!
SO, once again, I called a cab and it cost me $12 to get home. I have an idea for next time, for the cab to drop me off at a close intersection and walk the rest of the way, instead of going to my place which takes a while.
And today I’ve completed 2/3 assignments so far, and tomorrow I need to read over 300 pages of a book! Don’t you all wish you were me?
Well, there you have it folks… another week in Ottawa completed! Be sure to tune in next week 😉
Cheerio!
