Rob from Marion - M.S. Professional Media and Media Management studies

My name is Rob Craig.  I'm from Marion, Illinois and I'm an M.S. student in Professional Media and Media Management studies, with a focus on new media.

Through the M.S. program, my current interests are focused on the video game industry as an emerging media and as a large segment of new media, and a very important financial segment of media overall.

So my focus and my interests right now are on learning about the gaming industry both from a production position but also from a global media and distribution perspective. I bring to the table a number of years where I've worked as a historian, a collector and restorer of coin-operated gaming equipment.

Already, I've had opportunities to write articles for a magazine, where I'm a monthly columnist.  I've given presentations at an annual festival.  But what has happened here in this program is it's actually polished my presentation skills, polished my ability to write academically, from a research perspective.

It's encouraged me to go an extra mile to make sure that I understand fully what it is that I'm evaluating.  As an SIU employee, I get the opportunity to expand my education for free.  What I wanted to do was seek out a program, a master's program that was exciting and would give me lots of opportunities to learn new things--emerging technologies.

When I came across the M.S. program here in Mass Communications I became very excited about opportunities to learn not only new production methods and software and technology, but also to learn about the media distribution cycle, both here domestically and globally.

There was a class that I had with Professor Todd Herreman called Professional Recording Enginneering.  That was a very exciting course that offered me not only an opportunity to work with someone in

Professor Herreman who has industry experience and has worked with celebrity talent, but also to learn the tools that they use currently in the industry.

There's a group here on campus called CATS-- Computer Arts and Technology Society.  What it does is it reaches out to talented individuals who have an interest in computer arts or other types of technology, all across the university.

Having been a part of this club on campus this year, it was really a unique opportunity to learn the skills and talents of other people not just in this college but in other colleges on campus.

And then to reach out to those folks who maybe are working on a really interesting project to try to offer maybe some skills and talents that I have that they don't or to request skills or talents that I don't have.

The gaming industry is growing.  It's eclipsed the revenue by Hollywood's silver screen--the box office-- for many years now, and so it's important for SIU to be competitive.

So my goal is to really gain a large understanding of the gaming industry in the context of this college so that I can bring to the table some skills and talents and a plan for the university to enter the gaming education business.