Monthly Archives: May 2011

Your Name in Lights: Auditioning for UTTV

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I’m sitting uncomfortably on a stool, while a camera with a blinking red light stares at me mercilessly.

“Do you have any video editing experience?”

“No.”

“Do have any onscreen experience?”

“No… Wait, I was like, a news anchor in elementary school. For like, this community TV thing, I think it was called HTV, maybe, or something. Something. It was definitely called something. Oh, it was in California. Because like, that’s where I’m from. Oh, and I like… interviewed teachers… and stuff… I don’t know, I was ten.”

I can tell that I’m kind of stammering, but I try to make up for it by smiling a little bit wider. Then I remember that in that theatre camp I went to in the seventh grade, they told me not to smile so much in auditions. I instantly stop smiling. But oh, I’ve been told that I look mean when I’m not smiling. I settle for what I hope is a “pleasantly neutral” expression. (The last time I had to audition for anything at all was in my senior year of high school when I auditioned our drama club’s production of Footloose. I was in the chorus.)

Three of the executives of UTTV are sitting behind a desk in their office in the Sussex Clubhouse watching my internal struggle.  I noticed a flier for their upcoming open auditions in the Koffler Centre, and decided that I wanted to try to get involved with U of T’s only broadcasting television (Youtube) station. UTTV does some really fun things, broadcasting online to their website and youtube channel, from news shows, to interviewing students on the street,  It’s not exactly CBC. (UTTV hosts a reality show called Sudden Death Lockdown in which students are locked in a room, and systematically voted out of the room until there is only one contestant left. I’ve watched approximately 15 minutes of it, and it’s a more nuanced study of human nature than even the reality-show classic, The Jersey Shore.) But then again, it shouldn’t be CBC. The programming is at its best when it’s self-referential and tongue-in-cheek.

But I digress. I manage to stumble through the rest of the interview with only a few minor mishaps. No, I don’t know what kind of show I’d like to be on. Am I an actor? *Nervous laughter* Oh God, no!

(Here’s the general mise-en-scene. Although, I was probably approximately 100x more awkward than this girl.)

But despite it all, I still got an offer to work on a new show through UTTV. (If you’re interested in seeing YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS yourself on a Youtube channel, contact them right away, or go visit room 423 in 21 Sussex.) They’re in the process of developing new content, and they always conduct free editing tutorials for all U of T students.) I won’t be acting (thank God), or singing, but they liked me! They really liked me! (And with Oprah out of the picture, I should have the inspirational talk show market CORNERED.)

And then my life will be just like that celebrity lolcat’s.

Anyway, before I sign off for today, I want to share a little bit of wisdom that I’ve accumulated throughout my years at U of T. And I’m going to let Woody Allen say it for me:

And 70% of success is knowing where you should be showing up. And to that? I credit flyers.

THINGS THAT HAVE CHANGED MY LIFE, THAT I ONLY FIGURED OUT EXISTED BECAUSE I SAW A FLYER

1. The Hart House Finnish Exchange. I saw a flyer and applied. Ended up living in Helsinki, Finland for a summer, and it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

2. The Varsity. I saw a flyer advertising an open house. I went. Somehow, I ended up working there (practically living there) for the next three years as a writer and an editor. It has defined my university life.

3. Book and Media Studies. One of my majors. I only knew it existed because I picked up a flyer about it in the Kelly Library.

Getting involved is nerve-wracking and awkward. It’s scary. (I remember pacing outside of The Varsity office before I had the courage to walk inside for the first time.) But the great thing is, once you’re in, you’re in, and the more you force yourself to do things outside of your comfort zone, the easier it gets.

Your club, your way: How to start a student group on campus

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Dear Blogosphere,

I’m going to divulge a secret about myself: I’ve always felt that I was meant for greater things than the simple hum-drum life of a U of T undergraduate student. I dream of having fancy business cards, a group of minions to answer to my beck and call, fanfare every time I enter a room, and a title like: “Supreme Ruler.” Unfortunately, none of the clubs on campus seem to want me as the Supreme Ruler of their pre-established club. (If you read this, and decide that your club WOULD like to instate me as your Supreme Ruler, you should know that I like to have a fresh bowl of M&M’s on my desk every morning, and I only eat the red ones.) But in the interim, what if I want to start my own club, where I can call the shots, I can create something new, and I can achieve the eternal glory that is President and Founder of a University of Toronto Club.

Just kidding. (Kind of.)

There are something like 450 recognized clubs on campus, and the number is steadily increasing. But U of T is a multifaceted, diverse, and well, HUGE, institution. Despite the amount of preexisting organizations, there’s always more that can be done, always more resources to tap, always more sub-communities to create, ad infinitum.

In case you’re like me, and searching for eternal glory, or even just have a really great idea for an event on campus, a charity organization, or an identity group, read on. I went straight to the source at Student Life, speaking with Asim Ashraf, Coordinator of Campus Organizational Services, and Debbie Molnar, the Campus Groups Intern and co-founder and former President of the U of T Mature Students’ Association, to get advice on how to start up a recognized club, where to find office space and funding, and how to make your project succeed. (EDIT: Christine Mitchell was the other co-founder of MatSA.) And because I like lists, I bring you:

HOW TO EARN ETERNAL GLORY ON CAMPUS BY STARTING A RECOGNIZED STUDENT GROUP:

(And become a minor celebrity in the process)

1. The first thing you’ll want to do is WRITE A CONSTITUTION for your student group. For instance, if I wanted to start an Emily Appreciation Club, my constitution would entail the group’s name, (Emily Appreciation Club),  a clear purpose or vision, (This club aims to service the university community by creating awareness of the achievements of third-year student, Emily), a definition of your membership (your membership MUST be inclusive of all U of T students, and can include non-U of T members), a list of executives (Emily, Supreme Ruler, ect.), a clear financial plan (Student Life holds the right to AUDIT YOUR FINANCES at any time.), election protocol (Will there be a yearly executive election? Who can vote in it?), and amendment protocol (Should you need to change your constitution, what are the official steps you will have to go through to make it happen?). (All of this information is available in more detail here.)

2. The next step is to APPLY FOR RECOGNITION THROUGH ULIFE. Use the constitution that you’ve already drafted, and submit it online. (YOU ONLY NEED TWO MEMBERS OF YOUR NEW CLUB TO APPLY. Any volunteers to help me start up Emily Appreciation Club??) Should you need help or guidance, Asim is available by email, and you can always try dropping by the fifth floor of the 21 Sussex Club House to try to solicit some advice. Recognition through Ulife does not provide funding. However, it does mean that you “officially exist,” will be listed in Ulife’s repository of student clubs, can take advantage of the free web space provided by U of T, apply for office space* in the Sussex clubhouse, and, most importantly, it is required if you want to apply for recognition through UTSU. (Which is where the money is at.)

3. GET SOME MEMBERS. You need at least 30 members to apply for recognition through UTSU, and AT LEAST 51% of those members must be UTSU members (i.e. full-time undergraduate students). So make some posters and start recruiting. I recommend Facebook campaigns, approaching strangers on campus, asking professors if you can give talks at the beginning of large classes, postering high-traffic areas, ask course unions if you can make an announcement through their list serve… Or, my favourite recruitment method, STAGE A FLASH MOB AT ROBARTS.

4. Once you’ve got a team of adoring underlings club members, and recognition from Student Life, apply to be recognized from UTSU. UTSU can provide long and short-term funding**, and has a whole slew of practical services that they offer to their recognized clubs. Recognition opens each year on May 1st, and closes on March 1st of the academic year.

*To apply for office space, one of your executives MUST attend the Toolkit program and apply through the Committee to Allocate Student Activity Space.

**To apply for funding, at least one of your executives MUST attend UTSU leadership training.

So now you’ve got a group. Awesome. Here’s some more things to think about.

Here are some other things you might want to think about in your quest for eternal glory:

1. Office Space. No, not the 1999 classic comedy, the physical space where you can hold meetings, events, ect. For meeting hosting, your best bet is probably going to be Hart House. Only a few students know this, but any student can book a room at Hart House for free, by requesting the room two days before the desired meeting time. If you’re looking for something more permanent,  you can try for an office at 21 Sussex, but space is limited. Asim suggested going through individual colleges, as there is often more meeting spaces available there.

2. Outreach. Are there similar clubs to yours that are already established? Consider collaborating with the more established groups on events and other programming. For instance, are you starting a creative writer’s group? Consider reaching out to the Hart House Literary and Library Committee. A more established group will have more resources, and can also help boost membership and awareness.

3. Be creative when looking for funding. The biggest campus grant is probably the Hart House Good Ideas Fund, but Asim also recommended looking outside of U of T for grants. There are a lot of community groups interested in funding student initiatives. Keep your eyes open, and your ears to the ground!

4. Be responsible. It’s easy to start a group, much harder to make it work. If you’re going to do this, put your heart into it, and make sure that you’re passionate about the club you’re starting.

Impersonating Zuckerberg: Lessons on faking it until you make it at CUTC

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One of the lecture halls in the Medical Science building is illuminated with red spotlights and pumping with club music. It’s approximately 9am on a Saturday, and if it weren’t for the fact that the place is packed with keen young adults clad in variations on the theme of “business casual,” I would assume I had slept-walked into a club in the Entertainment District. It’s a little bit discombobulating.

I’m at the Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference, an annual student conference started up by the folks at the University of Waterloo eleven years ago. The conference has a variety of events, from key-note speakers, to programming competitions, to a technology expo. The speakers include Alexis Oharian, co-founder of Reddit, Matt Flannery, founder of Kiva, and Evan Reas, co-founder of Likealittle.

The conference is quintessentially cool. The MCs for the event are platinum blond, Torontonian bloggers with improbable haircuts; everything has been organized by students; attendees are encouraged to tweet questions to the speakers. It’s easy to imagine that you’re sitting in a lecture hall with the next Mark Zuckerberg, and listening to people who sold their start-ups to Conde-Nast for an “undisclosed sum” rumoured to be 12.8 million dollars is kind of awesome.

If you look carefully, you can see me holding onto my coffee for dear life on the left!

If you look carefully, you can see me holding onto my coffee for dear life on the left!

See, it really did look like a club. If a club had a bunch of seats, a CUTC logo, microphones, and a drop-down screen...

See, it really did look like a club. If a club had a bunch of seats, a CUTC logo, microphones, and a drop-down screen...

The first keynote speeches end, and we’re released to the technology exposition. I’m chatting with my technologically savvy contemporaries while looking at some of the technologies on display and chomping on free food. But as soon as I mention that I’m a writer, not a programmer, I keep getting this demoralizing reaction:

And there’s only so much of that a girl can take. I’m getting tired of shamefully pulling out my not-so-smart-pay-as-you-go-Samsung phone (food for thought: Is the opposite of a smart phone a stupid phone??), and justifying my philosophy degree to the folks I’ll be serving coffee to in a couple of years.

I decide, instead of facing further scorn, to come up with an alternate personality for myself, in which Emily-the-average becomes programmer extraordinaire, computer-science student, Emily Saskatchewan,* a mysterious genius who masterfully avoids follow-up questions and obfuscates a lack of technical know-how with an expansive repository of buzz-words.

And from Emily Saskatchewan’s adventures in tech-land, I bring you:

A BRIEF GUIDE TO IMPERSONATING A TECH ENTREPRENEUR SO THAT YOU CAN IMPRESS PEOPLE AT PARTIES

  1. Be cool. Wear jeans and a hoodie, a button-up shirt that doesn’t quite fit, or an ironic t-shirt with a blazer. Remember, you have more important things to think about than your appearance. You might put on a tie for your meeting with the President. Maybe.
  2. Make sure you have the right gear. If you don’t have an iPhone, a Blackberry or an Android, HIDE YOUR PHONE. Compensate by talking about apps. Talk vaguely about your groundbreaking app ideas. You can’t tell anyone, because they might steal your idea. Mention in passing that @mashable follows you on Twitter. It’s no big deal.
  3. Be Meme literate. Be in on the global inside joke. Know about sad Keanu and lolcats. If anything else comes up, fake it, or check Wikipedia.
  4. Hate The Man. This is the second tech boom. The classic business-man model is dead. Long-live the age of the creator. Say things like: “What makes a start-up successful is creating a product that people want, instead of trying to sell people something that they don’t need. My site doesn’t advertise itself as ‘user-friendly’ and ‘hip.’ We just are.” Make fun of Bill Gates whenever you can. Hack.
  5. Be definitive. Never waver on your pronounced opinions. Say things like: “Yeah, I dropped out of university to work for Google. I quit because I needed more ownership of my work. I have a few things in development right now. The site is in talks with a major media conglomeration but my lawyers tell me that I probably shouldn’t talk about it.”
  6. Be a visionary. You’re creating the future. You are creating the programs that are going to transform all of the cultural zeitgeist. Talk about the future. Talk about your plans, not for yourself, but for the world.

The real lesson I learned from CUTC is that anyone can make a start-up work, all you need is a good idea, someone with expertise, and a constitution made of steel. Until then, I recommend faking it until you make it. It worked for Emily Saskatchewan. Her imaginary start-up is doing great.

*not my real name

“The Medium is the Message:” Hanging out with Marshall McLuhan’s ghost at St. Mike’s

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Dear UpbeaT readers,

I’m Emily, your blogger for the summer months. Thanks for having me!

Late yesterday afternoon in the name of passion and blogging, I visited the Marshall McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. It’s a diminutive brick building nestled in the center of the buildings of St. Michael’s College. And trust me, unless you study Google maps before you head out, it’s pretty difficult to find. (Helpful hint: walk straight behind Alumni Hall until you’re in a parking lot, and it’ll be to your left.)

To be perfectly honest, I had never heard of McLuhan until I moved into residence at SMC, and accidentally stumbled into the Book and Media Studies program.

But as I quickly learned, Marshall McLuhan is kind of a big deal. You know that phrase that you hear everywhere: “The medium is the message?” Yeah, that was McLuhan. He revolutionized the study of media theory in the 1970s, totally calling the idea of “the global village” and predicting the World Wide Web long before the days in which talking about the revolutions facilitated by Facebook and Twitter became passé, and globalization was taken as a fact of the world, and not an eerie sci-fi fantasy.

He is considered to be the most publicized and controversial intellectual of the 20th century; he was named the most influential Canadian of the 20th-century by the Globe and Mail; St. Joseph St. is co-named “Marshall McLuhan Way”; and between 1946 and 1976 McLuhan called University of Toronto his home, teaching at English St. Michael’s College. (He also made a cameo in Woody Allen’s 1977 Annie Hall.)

Cut back to present day: I’m standing in front of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, on my way to meet with Dominique Scheffel-Dunan, the director of the Coach House Institute, a division of U of T’s Faculty of Information which hopes to further facilitate research that tries to make sense of the impact of the new digital landscape.

This little brick building is affectionately known as the coach house — the place where McLuhan hosted his weekly Communications and Culture seminars for students — and is currently hosting Robert Bean’s photography exhibit Illuminated Manuscripts, which pays homage to McLuhan’s legacy through a series of photos of out-dated technologies, and a projected montage of the papers, notes and letters of McLuhan, written in his own hand. The exhibit is a part of the Contact Photography Festival that’s currently taking place all over the city.

I enter the coach house, finally getting out of the downpour of rain that’s been plaguing these blissful exam-free weeks. And I’ll be honest, it’s a small space. The walls are freshly painted a stark white and minimally covered by striking images of inscrutable machinery. The only furniture in the place is an old-timey microphone standing in front of a projected screen of McLuhan’s papers, an uncomfortable metal couch, and, curiously, a chaise longue which once belonged to McLuhan.

Dominque Scheffel-Dunan introduces me to Robert Bean, the artistic mind behind the works I’m looking at now. And he is so much fun to talk to. I listen as he tells anecdotes of his journeys to obscure parts of Italy to find out-of-date technologies to photograph; his thoughts on the writings of McLuhan; his own research and curriculum in media arts (he teaches photography at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design); and his fascination with the idea of obsolescence.

And I don’t want to bore you, dear readers, (especially not in my first post!) but I just can’t help gushing. I’m a book and media studies student. I dig this stuff. These kind of conversations, are the things that make an undergraduate degree worth pursuing. They’re the ones that give you an adrenaline rush because you’re thinking so quickly — and your brain kind of feels like a trapeze artist jumping from idea to idea.

There’s also something innately cool about having an intellectual conversation that ranges from iPhones to Heidegger in five seconds flat in the place that housed Marshall McLuhan as he wrote the books that revolutionized the field of media research. Scheffel-Dunand later tells me that an organization is currently celebrating what would have been McLuhan’s 100th birthday on July 21, and trying to “make as much noise as they can” to appreciate and celebrate the intellectual legacy in Toronto.

The coach house is at 39a Queens Park Crescent, and if you have some spare time, I really do recommend dropping by. The doors are open from Tuesday-Saturday noon to 5 p.m., so bring a friend; impress a date; show off U of T to your friends who go to Ryerson. Even when we’re stuck in the grind of getting papers done at 4 a.m. before turning them in at 10 a.m., we are actually so lucky to be a part of an institution that has housed intellectuals who have revolutionized their fields and created intellectual legacies. (And even managed to end up in Woody Allen movies!)

Goodbyes, hellos, and an invitation: UpbeaT makes its seasonal shift

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Hello everyone: Chris Garbutt here, manager of the UpbeaT project at Student Life. You’ve probably read all the goodbye posts from this year’s bloggers. It’s been a great year at UpbeaT. Week after week, our bloggers told you about the amazing things they’ve done on campus, and some of the involved, engaged people who are also doing amazing things at U of T. Thanks to Cynthia, Danielle, Dara, Lori and Shannon for all your hard work!

Now that we’re into a new session, I hope you’ll welcome Emily, our new summer communications intern at Student Life. She’ll be your UpbeaT blogger until the end of the summer, and will pick up where the regular UpbeaT team left off.

Work for UpbeaT!

lifeatuoft is a great blog to work for, and we’re now looking for curious, creative and committed new bloggers for the 2011-2012 school year. Apply for any of these positions:

lifeatuoft Writer: Proven writer, either in print or online.

lifeatuoft Multimedia Blogger: You love to tell visual stories!

Physical Activity Blogger: Create posts about physical activity and healthy living!

Writer/Videoblogger (International): Find creative ways to capture and convey the range of international experiences and opportunities available through U of T’s Faculty of Arts & Science.

Deadline for these positions is May 31 or June 1.

Thanks to all our readers, and enjoy your summer. Keep reading!