Thanks to all the ICLA alumns and spring, 2008 students who made our first ICLA Mentor evening a rousing success! Approximately 125 of you gathered last night at the Pendleton Center for the launch of a program that we hope will help connect each group of students attending the L.A. program with alumns of the program working in the L.A. entertainment industry and related fields.
What the evening showed me is the huge interest people who have gone through the program have in staying connected to us and the school. That was not only heartening but encouraging to know that each group of students we have can benefit from the experiences, expertise and contacts of each prior class. There is already an active network of IC grads who exchange information and contacts and it's our hope to broaden that group and make it a bit easier for everyone to communicate.
After getting reacquainted (and eating!) during the first hour, we separated our alumn mentors into four different rooms divided by individual fields: writing and development; producing, directing and physical production; journalism, advertising and new media; and recent grads with entry level jobs in any and all of those fields. Our current students were then given the opportunity to go into each room and talk to people working in their specific fields. It was so truly exciting to see that our grads are working directors, producers, writers, cinematographers and animators while others are executives, agents, journalists, editors, and account exex. And that's not to leave out students involved in gaming, online journalism and production and even some who are entrepeneurs with their own businesses. Or many others in jobs too numerous to mention here.
A special nod also to many of our recent grads just getting started. Many work on and off as production assistants, apprentice editors and production coordinators, and assistants. Their determination, work ethic and boldness to take the necessary steps to move out here to fulfill their dreams are to be especially admired. Getting started can be challenging but I can't count the number of alumns with solid jobs and careers who voluntarily came up to both myself and Steve Tropiano and credited their LA internship and the people they met out here with both educating them about their field and introducing them to the people who gave them their first opportunities. That's really encouraging.
Our task now is to broaden the scope a bit and see if we can get more of our alumns involved in creating educational and potential internship/work opportunties for our students, or perhaps just serving as a sounding board for a studens who might be trying to choice between several different paths in front of them. To that end, we are in the process of putting together a series of smaller informal panels with working alumns in specific fields; creating an email mentor list for our incoming students; and planning numerous other activities we will let you all know about in the future. If anyone has ANY suggestions at all, please post here or email me at: sginsber@ithaca.edu. (that's sginsber, not sginsberg - for some reason I the final "g" in my last name was omitted from my Ithaca email account. I've never been able to figure out why but now, for some reason, I kinda like it that way :).
Again -- thanks to everyone!! And a special thanks to our adminstrative assistant (and IC alumn!) Holly Pietromonaco and program/services coordinator Jon Bassinger-Flores for helping us all make this event so special.
I will post some pictures of the event soon.
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2 comments:
Steve, thanks for planting the seeds of what will surely be a fantastic program! Here's the link to my photo album of the evening.
Kudos also to Steve Tropiano, Rob Meunier, Susan Reiner, and all past faculty and staff who have nurtured the IC students during their semesters in LA. While the internships might be the meat of the experience, the classes and programs are the skeleton which supports this enterprise. (Hmm...kinda carnivorous analogy, but, hey, it's a blog comment!)
I'm happy you brought that up Jon and I agree. We all especially owe a debt of gratitude to all the really talented people who contributed to the LA program. But especially to Steve Tropiano - who built the LA program from the ground up - one brick, er student, at a time. I so very clearly remember that small apartment in Oakwood that were the original offices!
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