Tech savvy is the way to be

Browsing through UCF’s digital media department, I came across a link for the International Digital Media and Arts Associations (IDMAA). IDMAA is a professional group founded by 15 universities, including UCF, which assists professors, scholars and students alike in their digital media curriculum.

IDMAA’s introduction talks about how around the world, universities are creating new digital media programs that correlate with Art, Computer Science, Journalism, Music, Theater, etc. IDMAA’s purpose is to address upcoming issues with job-related digital media skills, new media that are emerging, upcoming graduate programs in digital media, so on and so forth. There are even conferences that are held in various cities, as well as interest groups and student groups within the site.

I even found a link to this site at Poynter Online where Steve Outing, founder and publisher of Enthusiast Group LLC, blogs about it.

It got me thinking about how digital media is overlapping within almost all industries. It’s not just computer science majors anymore who need to learn digital media, but even journalism majors like myself. This got me regretting picking my minor in Sociology and wishing that I picked digital media. So I opened up the UCF catalog just to see what classes I would be taking if I did minor in digital media and sure enough there is an introduction class called, Principles of Digital Media. As I closely examined the curriculum, classes like Internet Interaction, Internet Software Design and Converging Media immediately captured my attention. These are classes that I could learn a ton from that would greatly benefit me in the future, especially when working in a multimedia news organization.

Even the Orlando Sentinel has taken interest in digital media students. One of the featured news on the UCF digital media department site was the Sentinel’s involvement with the digital media program. The Sentinel has offered a scholarship worth $6,000 available to digital media students for the first time in UCF history. And to top it of, the student who gets the scholarship also gets to choose from three internships at the Orlando Sentinel which are “web producer with Orlando CityBeat, multimedia producer or video producer, or web journalism interim based on their skills and interests,” as stated in the website. The Sentinel is offering this scholarship in “hopes to educate, inspire and expand the real-life experiences of Central Florida’s young professionals who are interested in the growing digital media field.”

So, if I could give advice to journalism majors who are trying to decide on a minor, I would definitely try to persuade them to pick digital media as a minor because most likely, they will need it in the future. I just wished someone would’ve told me that a year ago.