2018 Recap

Happy new year! As we charge ahead into 2019, I’d like to take a moment to look back on the year that was. The 2018 year was my first full year as an assistant professor at ASU. While I did complete some projects, I primarily laid groundwork that I hope will come to fruition in 2019. I’ll mention a few completions first.

Here I am presenting a poster on the work my TWC 422 students completed for the City of Glendale. Note the coffee mug that was attached to my hand for the last six weeks of the semester. Credit: Sustainable Cities Network AZ.

In my Fall 2018 undergraduate and graduate versions of Social Media in the Workplace (TWC 422/522), I partnered with the City of Glendale via the Project Cities arm of the Sustainable Cities Network AZ. The students of the two courses worked on separate projects to help revamp the City’s social media presence. The students of the graduate course worked on developing a Policies, Rules, and Procedures document to guide the city’s day-to-day work, while the undergraduate students developed a full Social Media Plan that encompassed audience/demographic targeting, content goals, strategy, management details, an implementation schedule, and budget considerations.

The culmination of these semester-long projects was a presentation to stakeholders from the City of Glendale; students presented a poster and an oral presentation describing their class projects. My TWC 522 students, who were online students, recorded a PowerPoint presentation with audio voiceovers–it went very smoothly. Select students of my TWC 422 course presented on the ideas the class came up with to help the City of Glendale reach specific, hard-to-reach demographic audiences. I also contributed to the poster presenting, as you can see in the above photo.

I enjoyed working with Project Cities and the City of Glendale very much. The students worked with a real client (which I always find to be of value to them), and I was able to couch what the students were learning throughout the course in the context of the two projects. This method of teaching was particularly helpful in the 422 undergraduate course. I look forward to working with Project Cities again in the future!

Beyond the completion of the Project Cities work, I also had work some research successes: I am happy to note that I received a C.R. Anderson Research Grant, had an article accepted for publication in May at Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, had a book chapter accepted for a book that should be out in December 2019, and presented at two conferences. (I also received two article rejections and an extensive Revise and Resubmit; nothing is ever quite an unbroken string of success.)

Finally, I became a member of the graduate faculty of the doctoral program in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication in Spring and began to mentor a doctoral student.

As for the groundwork, I have many articles and projects in various stages of completion; I look forward to completing some of them and sending them out for publication this year. I am particularly excited about finishing the work that the C.R. Anderson Grant funded surrounding a corpus analysis of Kickstarter campaigns.

Here’s to 2019! May your endeavors be moved speedily through the various channels we all navigate and emerge at the Elysian Fields of publication mostly unscathed.