The Triangle

Issue date: 6/6/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Bianca Pulido (Left to Right) Drexel freshman Brandon Weaver and Alex Rinaldi are just some of the many students at Drexel that are stressed out from balancing their school work and daily activities.

A group of students have recently begun using the blogosphere to tackle an issue many students face: managing a part-time job with the demands of school work and college life.

The students running the new blog, The Hot Mess, are part of an online journalism class taught by Ronald Bishop, associate professor and director of the Department of Culture and Communication.

Bishop described the site as, "[A] place where folks can go, where people can share information."

During the middle of the past term, the class decided to stray away from their syllabus and instead practice hands-on online journalism by creating a blog that worked for the "benefit of the community," Bishop said.

He added that part of goal was to allow professors to see some of the stresses in students' lives so as to better understand the hardships in juggling class and work.

Andrew Damiter, a senior majoring in journalism and one of the students who worked on The Hot Mess, recalled a professor who didn't care about students' lives aside from school and would continue to assign a great deal of homework.

Damiter replied by encouraging the professor to post and share his ideas on The Hot Mess. In fact, Bishop encourages any and all to post to the site at thehotmess.wordpress.com.

Bishop said the blog is "open to everyone" and could start a dialogue for students and faculty; he added that he is spreading the word and letting the site "crystallize slowly."

So far, Bishop has received positive comments in his department and would like to hear from other professors. Damiter was able to get almost thirty students to post to the blog, some being recent college graduates.

Damiter described his college and work experiences, explaining how he has often lost money to take midday interviews.

"[When I'm] not at class, I'm at work," Damiter said.

However, other students shared different views.

"[I have] never experienced problems like others have… [I was able to make] a work schedule where I made my own hours," Joel Brennan, a senior majoring in journalism, said.

Bishop said he is working on making the site nationally available for students to share their experiences. He has so far been able to encourage his class to receive posts from as far as Kansas.

The accessibility of a blog and its ability to be simplistic, focusing more on the content, can greatly help its expansion, Bishop said.

Damiter said the site would stay local "until [our] campus [was] engulfed." He also said the site has to grow from Drexel and gain more publicity.

In the coming months, Bishop will be addressing this issue and working on maintaining the site. During the upcoming terms, new classes and professors will continue the blog's efforts.

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