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ABOUT OURPROGRAM

On one end we have a socially-conscious group of mentors who study journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School. On the other, a group of smart, motivated teens from the Gary Comer Youth Center. Amazing things happen when we come together:

We create multimedia.We study journalism.We laugh and have great fun!

Our teens get one-on-one guidance from some of the best journalism students in the country.

Our mentors get to be big brothers and sisters to teens that teach us a lot about life.Our goal is to help our teens become better candidates for jobs or college admissions. They will graduate from the two-year program with the skills, equipment and confidence they need to produce multimedia. Even if they decide not to study journalism in college, our teens will leave this program knowing that they can do anything they put their mind to.

TEENS GAIN SKILLS AND CONFIDENCE AT JOURNALISM PROGRAM

By Jonathan MorrisSecond-year teen

From college mentors waking up early to ride the “L” downtown, to teens leaving the South Side of Chicago to gain new experiences, participants in the Medill Media Teens program work hard on Sat-urdays.

MMT is a program where high school students learn journalism through video, photography, audio and writing. It gives teens an op-portunity to discover a new passion for learning.

“It’s affected my life in a lot of ways,” said Logan Pugh, a second-year teen and sophomore at Urban Prep Academy. “I think I finally found out what I really want to do with myself when I go to college. I found my passion.”

Students from Northwestern Uni-versity’s Medill School travel from Evanston to mentor youth from the Gary Comer Youth Center.

“It is a journalism/media produc-tion class where we work on build-ing up our confidence and develop-ing ourselves as professionals and human beings,” Sarahmaria Go-mez, the program’s director, said.

She prepares throughout the week for Saturday’s class, so MMT

Spring 2012

Second-year teen Logan Pugh reports from the Occupy Chicago protests. Photo courtesy of Medill Media Teens

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runs smoothly. She buys the food, critiques teens’ resumes and scripts and listens to audio stories.

About 20 mentors take time to share their journalism skills with the teens to help them succeed every Saturday.

“I hope to develop my own journal-ism skills by helping teach others, but most importantly hope to share my love for journalism with stu-dents as interested in journalism as I am,” said Noah Rawitz, a first- year mentor for MMT and sopho-more at Northwestern.

The teens complete numerous projects over the course of the year. Whether the tasks were easy or difficult, the teens worked hard to finish their work during the 3-hour class.

Some projects included a Radio Diaries project, writing and record-ing a newscast and shooting and editing a live shot package on the Occupy Chicago protests nearby.

“I can say it is challenging when writing scripts, but it’s also fun and easy to understand,” said Patricia Lacaze, a first-year teen and sopho-more at Gary Comer College Prep.

Since last year, MMT received con-tinued funding from donors, which provided MacBook Pro computers for each student to use. The pro-gram has continued because of the support of John Lavine, Medill’s dean and Michele Bitoun, Senior Director of Undergraduate Educa-tion.

MEDIA TEENS EXPLORE EMOTIONS THROUGH AUDIO PROJECTS

By Kayla YancyFirst-year teen

For their first project of the year, students at Medill Media Teens told audio stories that demonstrated one of their best character traits.

“They were amazing projects,” Sarahmaria Gomez, the director of MMT said. “One specific story was Terick’s when he talked about humor. It was a really simple story about how his friend was having a bad day and he did some cartoon impersonations to cheer him up.”

Jonathan Morris, a second-year teen and a sophomore at Kenwood Academy, chose hardworking as his character trait to show his dedi-cation to MMT.

“It showed Media Teens that I was really serious about it and the traits that I bring to Media Teens I can also bring to real life,” Morris said.

Some teens used their stories to show the character traits that make them different from other people.

“I chose to talk about modesty because some people in the world think they’re top dog, and I chose modesty because I don’t do that,” said Kobi Howell, a first-year teen and sophomore at Urban Prep Academy.

During winter quarter, the teens took their audio skills to the next level with the Radio Diaries proj-ect. The goal was for teens to learn audio producing/editing while cap-turing moments from their lives.

Chyna Morrison, a first year in MMT and a sophomore at Gwen-dolyn Brooks College Prep, used

HOMEWORK, WHO DOES IT?

By Marissa SmithFirst-year teen

Every Saturday morning, a group of high school students from the Gary Comer Youth Center board a bus to the Northwestern Universi-ty’s Medill School downtown Chi-cago newsroom. These students are a part of a program called Medill Media Teens, which teaches them how to shoot and edit video, audio and take photos.

It’s 9:30 a.m. At the newsroom, MMT Director Sarahmaria Go-mez prepares for the week’s class, and when MMT mentors, who are undergraduate students at Medill, arrive, they assist her in setting up equipment and receive a debriefing on the projects for the day before the teens arrive at 10 a.m.

“What I try to do is to find projects that the students are interested in doing because they will be more likely to do them,” Gomez said.

Besides keeping the teens focused in class, one of Gomez’s goals is to extend their interest in broadcast journalism techniques outside the newsroom.

“I want you to complete homework assignments and assignments over break because I want you to always have journalism at the back of your mind somehow,” she said.

Despite Gomez’s intentions and ef-forts to interest the students in their assignments, interest and effort isn’t always enough to motivate them to complete their homework each week.

Jonathan Morris, a second-year teen, said although he thought the assignments were easy, he some-times had trouble finding time to

do homework. MMT work would often occur Friday night or Satur-day morning before class.

“I think it was difficult to complete [the assignments] during a busy schedule,” Morris said.

Morris said he would spend any-where from 10 minutes on “some-thing simple” to two or three days on more extensive assignments for which he needed different angles.

On the other hand, students like Jomari Glover easily incorporated homework into their weekly rou-tine.

“Some assignments, I thought they were easy because they were very convenient to get the pictures for or it was just a part of my sched-ule,” Glover said. “I spend a good few days on [assignments] so I can

First-year teen J’Nae Agbenla and mentor Alexandria Johnson edit audio together. Photo by Samantha Zabell, Medill Class of 2015

First-year teen Alexandra Scott uses her photography skills to capture the South Shore Drill Team flag girls in action. Photo by Alexandra Scott, first-year teen

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Megan Joyce, a second-year men-tor and Northwestern sophomore, said she felt strongly about the graduation celebration from last year and the impression it left on the audience.

“[It] was the greatest thing ever, to see so many supporters, to be there and look at our work and see the projects we’ve been doing,” Joyce said. “They were so impressed.”

Gomez said she was given the op-portunity to attend Northwestern to further her education, which gave her the passion to help others pur-sue careers in journalism.

“You have access to the stories that need to be told, and I think it’s a great opportunity for you all to grow as people and grow as journalists,” Gomez said. “I want to help other people have those op-portunities and especially you guys because you’re so great.”

her project to express herself with her best friend. “I used a song [I recorded] with my best friend Alexis,” she said. “She wrote it. She asked me to sing it. She talked about her father, and I sang the chorus, how life has ups and downs.”

Gomez said she loved to learn more about the teens by listening to their radio diaries and audio stories.

make sure they’re how I want them to look.”

Gomez has her own estimate of how many students regularly com-plete their assignments. She says about 10 teens always finish their homework each week.

“The secret is that people think that I don’t know if they don’t do their homework, or they think that I don’t know when they don’t com-plete [their] project,” Gomez said. “But I have a grid that shows every single student’s name, and every single student’s performance in this class. So that might be a little surprising.”

Some students said they finish their assignments every week. First-year teen Tashjorie Johnson said she completes her work “99 percent” of the time, and Glover said she fin-ished her homework “almost every time,” with the exception of one time her photos refused to transfer off her phone.

Morris said he completes his work “four out of five times,” but even when he doesn’t finish his assign-ments on time, he will eventually complete them.

“When my [homework] was incomplete, I felt guilty because I

had long enough to do it, but then sometimes [there were] problems and I couldn’t do it,” Morris said. “But I would feel that guilty feel-ing, knowing that Sarahmaria puts in her time to do things, so I should also put in my time.”

Despite problems and struggles regarding completing homework, Morris and Glover said they appre-ciate the assignments. “It’s a lot of fun, and I enjoy taking pictures and doing all the journal-ism projects,” Glover said.

Morris agrees.

“The homework assignments have nothing to do with my input on Medill,” he said. “I love Medill, and the homework is just another way of having fun.”

JOURNALISM PROGRAM

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“I not only learn more about you, I can hear that you learn more about yourselves,” she said. “When I see how much you’ve grown just from being around each other and being around the mentors, it’s the greatest gift to be a part of your lives.”

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HOMEWORKfrom page 3