By Mike Amatucci//
Hood College’s Communication Arts program unveiled its new, state-of-the-art television broadcast studio in Rosenstock Hall Thursday.

“In the last year-and-a-half, we have been trying to find ideas to broaden the options for Communications students,” said Tim Jacobsen, an adjunct professor at Hood, “I also work down at the University of Maryland and they have a lot of programs down there that consist of student-run broadcast programs in which I act as a faculty adviser to that…and there are just a bunch of skills sets to learn by using that technology.”

The dedication ceremony involved Hood College Communication Arts students, alumni, teachers and faculty alike – along with the President Andrea Chapdelaine – participating in the ribbon cutting ceremony just outside the studio on the third floor of Rosenstock Hall.

Like so many other colleges and universities across the country, Hood College has now boosted its Communication Arts program with the addition of this new television studio. A $20,000 grant from the Delaplaine Foundation along with additional funding from the school’s administration and alumni made this project a reality, all while being facilitated by Hood’s own Elizabeth Atwood, Donna Bertazzoni, Jacobsen and Jeff Welsh of the IT Department.
“We see this as a three-phase project,” Bertazzoni said. Ultimately this will aim to renovate the entire third floor of Rosenstock Hall into a complete center for communications classes, students and faculty in the department.

“We have put in a second grant proposal to the Delaplaine Foundation to renovate Rosenstock 305 into a Mac lab,” Bertazzoni said, “and what would happen is that we would shift our classes from Rosenstock 219 upstairs and we would have students be able to – for example – write a broadcast script, then go into the studio and read it off the teleprompter so they could get some experience that way.”

With a recent, heightened interest in the communications and journalism fields, Jacobsen recounted that Hood’s main goal in moving forward with this idea started with a simple question.

“What can we do to bring something here that would be more of a recruitment tool,” Jacobsen said, “and to give the students that are here a more well-balanced, rounded experience to make them more prepared to find jobs?”
With the amount of new technology located in the studio – soundboards, teleprompters, monitors, lighting, etc. – Hood students with an interest in the Communication Arts will get a chance to work hands-on with the equipment of today’s media industries, exposing them to a whole new level of creative prowess previously they never would have gotten to experience otherwise if it wasn’t for the efforts of Dr. Atwood and her colleagues.

“She went to a variety of colleges and toured them,” Bertazzoni – a professor of Journalism at Hood – added, “and put together a proposal for a broadcast studio that would allow us, first of all, to better teach our students better things having to do with broadcasting – whether it is sitting at an anchor desk and reading off a teleprompter, being behind the camera, etc. – and enhance the quality of our program, but at the same time we wanted to have something that was exciting and new that would attract students to the program.”

“Over the summer, I took part in – along with Jeff Welsh,” Jacobsen added, “finding and putting a lot of the equipment together so it was kind of like Christmas but then once you open the present you realize that you have to put everything together.”

For sophomore student-athlete and communications major Scott Kiewe, the establishment of a news studio on campus is already a step in the right direction as far as a career goes.
“It has always been my dream to become a news anchor for a television station, and now that Hood has the technology and resources, I will now be able to further pursue my aspirations and get the training I need following my graduation.”

Kiewe is currently enrolled in Jacobsen’s Visual Media Production I class at Hood. Although the class is held in the Tatem Arts Center, Jacobsen’s curriculum consists of working with DSLR cameras and Adobe software – specifically Premiere Pro – to learn the basics of camera operation and digital media editing. These basic skills will be vital to Kiewe and other student’s transition into Visual Media Production II in the spring semester where they will be working more diligently in the broadcast studio.