Victoria from Chicago - M.S. Professional Media and Media Management

My name is Victoria Carter.  I'm from Chicago, Illinois.  I'm a M.S. student in the Professional Media and Media Management program with a concentration in documentary media.

When I came here, I was just visiting Carbondale.  I really hadn't thought too much about grad school.  But I loved how nice the people were and how they were willing to help me out in trying to figure out the process of grad school, as well as the school has so many resources and you have so much access to all kinds of equipment, all kinds of editing software.

Everything is at your disposal so you can be as creative as you want to be.  I specifically work in documentary, so currently my master's final project is on black women and hip hop-- where we exist and how our sexuality is used.

The "Documentary for Broadcast" class was my favorite class because I was able to be a part of a team and to really follow the process of creating a documentary for television from beginning to end.  It wasn't just me creating a student project.  It was really something for my professional career.

I was one of the TA's for an intro to production course for Radio & Television and I loved it!  I never thought that I would love teaching, but it was such a great opportunity to do for 2 years to help teach these undergraduate students about my field.  It was a great opportunity to talk about audio production, film production, studio production and what it means to create a story.  I really felt like I was giving back.

Recently, I've been submitting edits of my documentary on black women in hip hop. It's called "Auction Block Sexuality," and I've submitted it to 2 film festivals and one of them I just heard back a couple weeks ago that I won 3rd place!  It was at Eastern Illinois University and I won 3rd place. It was pretty cool.

I socialize with everyone in the department. I think what's cool about MCMA in general is that we're all kind of interconnected.  It's really cool for brainstorming so when I'm trying to get ideas. I have people that I can go to that are working in different facets of the field.

When I get out of here, I would like to work in television for a while, and progressively in film and obtain the business aspects that I would like from those companies and then go out and start on my own.

The really cool thing about the M.S. program is that it gives you so many options.  You don't have to specifically just concentrate in documentary, you can into advertising, photography, whatever you want to do and it gives you a business spin on whatever you've chosen to do.

And that's really cool because very rarely do you see programs that allow you to have this simultaneous experience where you're creating media and you're getting a new perspective on how to become a better professional.