Highlights/Major Projects:
Master’s Capstone
In the Truman School, in lieu of a thesis students do an applied project for an organization or a research paper to make recommendations about a policy issue. I did my capstone over the summer, and wrote a paper about the growth of the city of Columbia, Mo. and whether or not the city council needed new members to adequately represent the city’s population. This involved research into the city’s history and past growth patterns and academic literature about representation in local government, in addition to interviews with current council members, data-mining citizen surveys and comparative analysis of other cities of similar size in the region. The paper is available upon request.
UMSystem.edu/Advancing Missouri
While working for the UM System as a strategic communications assistant, I was involved in developing the Advancing Missouri PR campaign. Advancing Missouri is designed to educate Missourians about how the university system affects the lives of the state’s citizens in ways including but not limited to education, such as highlighting research/economic development and community service activities. Part of this project included work on the transition to a new System Web site, which includes a map that allows citizens to see the economic and educational impact of the university in their county and stories about the university’s outreach in their community. Part of my job was gathering, generating and posting this data into the CMS and making sure that there was data and at least one story for every county in the state.
Lambda Chi alumni newsletter
As you can see on the “newsletters” page, I’ve been in charge of the alumni newsletter for my chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity for about 6 months now. Since then, I’ve redesigned the newsletter and I’ve tried to bring in more diverse types of content and more “news” stories about things that are happening rather than traditional newsletter blurbs about upcoming events and meeting minutes. I’ve also tried to expand the delivery mechanisms for it, by using Scribd as a host and distributing the PDF via links on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the e-mail listserv. Scribd has allowed us to see that since we started this new system, our readership has almost tripled (May 2011: 67 reads, July 2011: 88 reads, Sept. 2011: 109 reads, Dec. 2011: 190 reads).
Other work samples:
Here you can see some of the work I’ve done at the various jobs and internships I’ve had. The samples are divided into categories based on the type of work: