I am finally getting to the meat of my college experience. I can write all I want about my friends, enemies, roommates and women I wanted to hook up with, but the real reason I went to college was to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. What I am going to do for the next few weeks is dissect what I went through in the two majors that I declared.
I decided to go to Eastern New Mexico University because their Radio/TV Department had an outstanding reputation for being THE college in New Mexico to learn about Radio and TV broadcasting. They had their own FM and AM radio stations and PBS TV studio. They had the latest in equipment and frequently updated to include the latest in technology.
My mother was shocked at my initial choice for a major. She thought I was only going to minor in Radio/TV and major in something like Computer Science. I liked computers and knew how to program in Basic, but that really didn't appeal to me as something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. As it turns out, Microsoft Windows started making headway in 1985 and everything I would have learned before that would have become completely worthless. (At the insistence of my Mom, I took one computer language class during the summer of 1985. We had no way of knowing that would be a waste of time.)
When I pre-registered for college, I signed up for the Broadcast Workshop class. In this, you could work in any of the different areas of broacasting that they offered. There was AM Radio, FM Radio, Radio News, TV Operations, TV News and Special Programs. If you were smart, you would try to do something different every semester.
For my first semester, I thought I'd start by seeing what it was like to be a Radio DJ, so I signed up for AM Radio. I learned how to play records, talk on the air and announce the news and sports. I used that opportunity to be completely goofy on my show. I pretty much winged it without really knowing what I was doing. However, once I was reading the news and there was this one story that took place in Masschusetts. Every time, I kept garbling the word "Massachusetts." Dr. B, the head of the Radio/TV department was listening. He called me up while I was on the air to tell me I had mispronounced it. The next time I had to read the same story, I stumbled again. He called again and asked which state had Boston as its capital. I said, "Massachuetts" without goofing it up. He said, "That's the way you're supposed to pronounce it."
One problem with the station is that before I got there, it was a REAL college radio station. The students had complete control over the programming and played the latest bands and the newest music. But the semester I was there, those in charge changed the format to Adult Contemporary and we were forced to play only the songs that fit into that genre. It really took a lot of the excitement out. The only exception was the "Blue Plate Special" program during the lunch hour. That meant we could only be a typical college radio station for one hour each day. A couple of years later, the students were able to get the format changed.
In the Spring semester, I signed up for TV Operations. I learned how the programming got on the air at the PBS station. For some reason, I was late in signing up for a slot and got stuck doing Ops for four hours every Saturday nights. I didn't realize what kind of impact that was going to have on my social life. I also didn't realize that working Ops at night meant that I wasn't going to learn how to switch to put the videotaped shows on the air. The general manager didn't want the students screwing things up during "Nova," but didn't have a problem with it during "Sesame Street." All I did was clean the VTR machines and cue up the tapes. That turned out to be a waste of a Broadcast Workshop for me.
I'm going to extend my freshman year into the summer 1983 school session, even though I was technically a sophomore at that time. Basically, all I did was take the Introduction to Communications class. This class was required in order to take the TV production class. Most TV/Radio students take this during freshman year. I was persuaded by Dr. B to take an Introduction to Broadcasting class that was not on my degree plan.
Under normal circumstances, Introduction to Communications would focus more on broadcasting. However, the professor teaching it during the summer was in the print journalism department and he placed a lot more emphasis on that. One thing I should point out is that our print journalism department sucked. If you're going to go to college to learn how to work at a newspaper, you need to go to one that puts a student newspaper out every day. Ours only came out once a week. I can only imagine that would only help journalism students at ENMU get work at neighborhood weeklies. I probably would have done better in the class if there was more emphasis on broadcasting.
But sophomore year was when the fun really began. That will be next.
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