Leeds Trinity - Open Day October 2011

Today was one of Leeds Trinity University's Open Days - and I was one of the volunteers who was on hand to promote the high calibre studying that gets done in our Centre for Journalism. I'm a Second Year Journalism BA student, and very keen to involve myself in more of the extra-curricular activities.


For anyone who was following my twitter feed today, you'll have seen quite a few tweets from #LTOpenDay as we did our best to keep a running commentary going. We even had a widescreen set up using TwitterFall to chart the hashtag's development (picture left), although I cannot confirm we started trending!
We also noted that out of all the other departments, student groups, faculty members, etcetera, we were the only contributors. I'm sure other hacks have observed that twitter seems to have a rather selective user-base, and I've often argued twitter's relative importance to journalism in terms of social media interaction, as against something like Facebook. But that's a discussion for another time.


As well as discussing our Journalism, Sports Journalism, and Journalism (Post-Graduate) programs with potential students and parents, the volunteers were using our brand new JVC HM100 cameras to conduct interviews. This way, we became more familiar with these advanced units, whilst demonstrating our technical resources to the milling punters - sorry, propsective admissions. On the right, Megan Savage is interviewing an interested party whilst Valerie Durussel operates the camera.


Sadly we neglected to record any footage so I can't bring you any journalistic 'baby pictures' of early ad-libbed interviews, but that's probably for the best. However, we tried to bridge the experience with other departments.

Here, Valerie is interviewing two of our Sports, Health and Nutrition students who are also drawing attention to our successful rugby team, whilst Sammy Parker handles camera duties, and Senior Lecturer Lindsay Eastwood producers, er, via her mobile. I've linked to some twitter accounts here, so that they can get their followers now before they become huge!

Our thanks then to the department staff who helped out, including Head of the Centre for Journalism Catherine O'Connor (left), as well as Post-Graduate Broadcast Programme Leader Richard Horsman, and Principal Lecturer Dean Naidoo to name just a few. We all hope that students and parents went away informed and enthusiastic about a place at Leeds Trinity University. On the whole, potential candidates for degrees seem confident in spite of the fees hike, willing to defer the worry of debt in favour of a career likely to be able to sustain it - and I for one am in full agreement. Hopefully this marks the beginning of a new era of co-operation between institutions and students that will redress the economic balance.

That's been my blog on the most recent Open Day at Leeds Trinity - until next time!