My McGill Symposium

Hi Family.
Daddy wanted me to make a post about my McGill Symposium that happened on Wednesday, so I finally obliged.

The Symposium is an extension of the McGill lecture series, that invited top editors from around the nation to lecture Grady students every year. This year, they decided to gather a group of 5 professors and have them pick 12 (10 undergrad, 2 grad) students they thought were some of the highest acheiving students in Grady College. I was, somehow, one of them. What we did all day was had round-table dicussions with 6 visiting journalists on 4 different topics that all related to what is journalistic courage. It was really interesting and riveting conversations.

The first pair were from a newspaper in Idaho that uncovered a child molester in the boyscouts, even though the boyscouts, the Mormon church, and the court all covered it up, and he was still working in teh boyscouts. Everyone was trashing the poor reporter, who turned out to be gay. They outed him publiclly, his life partner got fired from his job, and there were threats on his and his editors life....all because he was trying to stop a child molester!!!

The second talk was from a really cool woman named Moni Basu, whose been imbedded in Iraq 6 different times. She is orginally from India, so both being a woman and being Indian worked against (and sometimes for) her when over there. She was really interesting and a very strong journalist, and a strong woman at that. I really enjoyed her talk. She was my favorite of the day.

The next one could have been cool, but our speaker was a little clueless. He was supposed to talk with us about Ethnic Press, but he just sort of gave us a history of Black Journalism in America, whcih most of us are pretty familar with anyway. He didn't give many chances to talk, though I did manage to get in a question about what he thinks we should do about minority writers who are in the mainstream press, and the mainstream press only wants "moderate" writers of color, in order to appeal to a white audience. I asked what he thinks should be done about that. He sort of waffled and said the we need a wide range of everyone in all facets(?).

The final pair were two medical journalists; one was Harriet Washington, the author of a book called Medical Aparthied, which is a history of medical experimentation on black people in America. The other was this woman named Margie Mason, who covers all of the medical beat in Asia for the AP. Both really acomplished, really interesting.

It was this talk, however, when I got into it with Margie, and I am proud to say that I was the only student that day to piss off and actually debate with one of the jouranlists. She said something that really stuck in my craw: she was talking about emotions when you are witnessing horrfic scenes (like the Tsunami, AIDS, ect.) and how she has to "work twice as hard as a man" to hide them because if you show emotion when you are a woman, you are looked down upon and so on. Now, I thought a lot of the stories we had read by her had a pretty humanitarian angle, so it obvious she hasn't completely shut down her emotions, so I asked her how she thought that was effective, and what does she think would happen (to her writing) if she more embraced her emotions. She got a little flustered and asked me to clarify. I just said if she was aware of them more and wasn't ashamed of them, or hid them b/c she was a little woman. And she kept asking me "Do you think I should cry on the field? Is that what you think?" and I said I didn't think that was professional; and rather, dealing with your emotions was a professionalism thing, not a WOMAN thing. Of course, crazy feminist that I am, it just had to come out at some point.

I thought I made an ass of myself, and I felt bad that she got upset, but my teacher who was there, Dr. Boyd, the one whose class I am always making a stink in, cornered me later and said that she was really proud of me for calling Margie out and pointing out that flaw in her method. And then in class the next day, she had to tell the whole class about it (three of the people from the Symposium were in that class, so they were sort of egging her on) and it was pretty embarassing.

I did a lot of networking at the reception, talking to people from the AJC and other places. The edior from the Idaho Newspaper ate lunch at my small table, and he was really helpful too. Hopefully, this will help me get further in my career, as well as it was a great learning experience. I am really glad I did it.

Aside from that, everything seems well. My mono-like virus has flared up again. I might go back to the healthcenter on Monday. My swollen lymph nodes are bugging the heck outta me.

And I turn 21 in 18 days. I am so exctied. But I will be home for Thanksgiving before that!

Love you guys,
Kacie