My youngest student was maybe 22 and my oldest student was in his early 60s. They represented a wide variety of experience, skills, and abilities.

How long have you been a part of the VCU community, and what brought you here?

This is my second year and I'm teaching in the online program because I'm a full-time associate professor at Appalachian State University. At Appalachian State, I teach in the public relations concentration and also the social media classes. I saw the listing that they were looking for someone to teach this class, and then a friend of mine sent it to me as well. So I immediately reached out to Dr. Hanger about it because teaching a class like this is one of the reasons I went to grad school. I am a relatively new PhD; I just graduated from NC State in 2018. I've been in industry most of my life. I started out doing publicity and PR in the media music industry, then ended up eventually needing health insurance so I ended up working in the non-profit sector for years and then kept getting recruited and worked in a couple of agencies in Raleigh. And then finally after the 2009 financial meltdown, I decided that I wanted to go back to school and go back to what I really wanted to do, which was to work in promotions publicity. I was managing accounts, and so I did my master's at NC State as a part-time student. So, I wanted to bring some of what I knew from industry and take it to application. At App State, we don't have a graduate program. I can bring some of it to some of the classes I teach, but honestly, there's no room in the curriculum for it. So, I was glad for the opportunity to use my experience and bring it to VCU. 

 

What motivates you to be in the field of mass communications?

Going way back to my undergrad, I wanted to be in journalism and I went to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I ended up working in a music retailer as my job in undergrad doing a lot of writing for an in-house publication. So really my passion for music and my love of writing brought it to me. And so that's how I ended up working for a small label and distributor, which now they're the largest independent music distributor in the US. Music, writing about music, talking about music, and turning other people and other writers on to music is really what brought me to it. 

 

What drew you to be a part of the Graduate Program at the Robertson School, and what makes it unique?

I love the fact that it's so flexible. The masters program I went to was very inflexible. You could do part-time, but you took the exact same type of classes that the full-time students did. Not that that's a bad thing; it set me up great for my PhD,  but there's no room to work with people that had an emergency at work or fell behind or something.

The way that the graduate programs and the certificate program is set up is that people can kind of work through different paths to get to the skills and the training that they need. And I think that's what makes it popular, and I also love the fact that the program has so many folks from campus going through it, like the staff. At Robertson, there's so many paths. The door is wide open from everything I see; it’s very unique and supportive in that way.

 

What’s been the most rewarding aspect of teaching in the program so far?

I'm getting to work with a wider variety of students. Last fall, I think my youngest student was maybe 22 and my oldest student was in his early 60s. They represented a wide variety of experience, skills, and abilities. What they brought to their work and their projects was just radically different and it spawned creativity. We do some online discussions and things so that they can kind of root for each other and brainstorm. When you can have a really interesting group of people, you can generate some real brainstorming and discussion that makes it worthwhile. People can learn from each other just as much as they can from the material and the teacher sometimes.

 

How would you describe your teaching style?

I think of myself more as a guide. When you go on a tour or on a hike and you meet up with somebody who's just going to kind of guide you along the way and point out important things to take note of like tell you to stop here, focus on that. That's how I see myself. I don't see myself as this expert where I'm just dumping knowledge onto you. I think that is a really old school and out of phase way to teach, especially for anybody who's been in industry as a lot of grads have. So, I assign the reading, I make the reading pertinent to what they're doing (It's generally industry-based). And then basically I'm here to work with you. I tend to do short videos and things that again are designed to guide and share ideas to get the ball rolling. I really consider myself as a guy who's been in the trenches that knows my way around.  I want you to jump in with both feet, and when you run into questions, come to me and I'm happy to be here to help you.

 

What can students expect out of your class next semester?

Hopefully they can expect to learn a good bit about measurement. We focus on social media analytics just because it's so accessible to us and because that's the way you know everything's going. And also because we do have so many folks from staff and from different areas around the university who are in there. They definitely do a lot with Google Analytics, and we do a free Google Analytics certification. The goal is just to think about measurement and think about the various different ways to quantify what you're doing online. The ultimate goal, and this is straight from industry, if you can't measure it, don't do it. You will definitely get over your anxiety about jumping into analytics tools. You'll learn all the basics. You'll certainly learn your way around GA, learn the taxonomy, how to use these terms, and all the basics of things like measurement.

 

What is one piece of advice you would give to incoming students of the Graduate Program?

Just don't be afraid. Don't feel like you have to have any experience in this before joining this class. It's very doable. I pace it in such a way so that you do have things that you do every week, but that it is very doable on top of working full-time. I know what it's like. I worked full-time; I was in an agency with 15 active accounts and I did my masters on top of it. The goal is for you to come up with something that's a portfolio piece for you. Whether you intend to go on in academia, into another degree, help build toward a thesis for those in the masters, or if you just want a portfolio piece to take back to work and say “hey look here's an evaluation plan for us, let's implement it”. So either way you will come out with something to show.