More About Me
Career...
When I was in college, I did some tutoring and worked in the Alumni Office at Ursinus College. For two summers during college, I worked as a camp counselor for Warwick Township.
When I was in graduate school at American University, I served as a teaching assistant.
I worked for a year at Haley Productions (now Allied Pixel) as a non-linear editor and producer.
When I was in graduate school at Temple University I served as a teaching assistant and instructor and I also worked as an Adjunct Professor of Communication at Arcadia University and Drexel University. I also spent a summer working as an instructor at Julian Krinsky Camps and Programs at Haverford College. For a year, I was a resident and programming assistant at the International House of Philadelphia.
In 2004, I began searching for a full-time teaching position in the Northeast U.S. Ideally, I wanted to find a position at a relatively small school and was looking for a job that allowed me to teach both video production and more academic/theoretical communication and media topics. I also wanted to find a place that was near a city, not in the middle of nowhere and still relatively close to my family in Pennsylvania (a short plane ride at least). As fate would have it, I saw a position advertised that met every single requirement I was looking for at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts (5 miles from downtown Boston). After interviewing there, I knew it would be a good match and shortly thereafter, I was fortunate enough to have a job offer from them as an Assistant Professor of Communication. I moved to the Boston area in August 2004 and began teaching at Pine Manor during the fall 2004 semester. At Pine Manor I taught a variety of courses such as "Multicultural Images in the Media," "Images of Women in the Media," "Children and the Media," "Legal and Ethical Issues in Mass Communication," "Writing and Marketing Scripts and Screenplays," "The Art and Industry of Film," "Introduction to TV and Radio Production," "Digital Moviemaking," "Advanced Video Production," "Performing for Radio and Television," "First Year Seminar - A Picture's Worth A Thousand Words," and "Senior Internship Seminar."
During my time at Pine Manor I was awarded the Lindsey Professorship which allowed me to take a semester-long sabbatical leave during the Spring 2007 semester. During my sabbatical leave I had the amazing experience of serving as a visiting lecturer on the Spring 2007 Semester at Sea voyage that circumnavigated the planet over the course of three and a half months. On the ship, I taught "Intercultural Communication," "Cinema and National Identity," and "Mass Media Systems Around the World" as the ship made stops in Nassau, the Bahamas; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Salvador, Brazil; Cape Town, South Africa; Port Louis, Mauritius; Chennai, India; Penang, Malaysia; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Hong Kong, China; Qingdao, China; Kobe, Japan; Honolulu, Hawai'i, USA; and San Diego, California, USA. The experience was all the more memorable because Archbishop Desmond Tutu was onboard for the entire voyage as a distinguished lecturer-in-residence.
After five years at Pine Manor I decided to leave because the salaries Pine Manor offered were not commensurate with the cost of living in the Boston area and it was always difficult to make ends meet each year I was there. As much as I would have loved to have stayed there longer as it was an ideal job for me, it was simply not economically feasible for me to spend the rest of my career there. I also decided to leave because I wanted to move back down the Philadelphia area again to live closer to family.
I have continued my teaching as an academic and test preparation tutor for StudyPoint and during the summer of 2010 and 2011, I worked for The Experiment in International Living leading a group of high school students to the United Kingdom for four weeks (July 2010, July 2011). Specifically, the program I led was called "United Kingdom: Capturing Britain on Film" and I helped students create a mini-documentary as we traveled throughout the United Kingdom. During the spring 2012 semester, I also worked as an Adjunct Professor of Communication at Ursinus College.