Fire-Wired Blog

I have a distinct memory from my junior year at Iowa State where my adviser asked "What are your workplace goals?" It wasn't a question I had ever been asked and certainly not something 21-year-old Pat had every considered. Everyone's been asked about their dream job or their career goals, but I had never heard the specific phrase of "workplace goals." Being someone who likes to reflect on interesting and unexpected encounters it took me a bit to come up with my dream workplace criteria. See workplace doesn't mean employer. I could fire off a list of dream employers in a heartbeat, but that wasn't the question. Second, goal isn't the same thing as dream. Goals are things you work towards and achieve, dreams are things that magically happen, e.g. lucky happenstance. There's also the possibility of dreams turning into nightmares, whereas goals are personally crafted and continually rewarding. After a minute of thinking out-loud about wha...

When I blog about my 9-5 I tend to talk about the perks; interviewing someone cool, filming something people might be jealous of, getting into sporting events free...   For the most part I get to do some cool stuff because of the nature of my work. Some things I get to cover I assume are going to be cool but end up being something entirely different. Welcome to today.   This morning I set up shop at 9:30 a.m. in the atrium of Howe Hall for a town hall meeting featuring the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden. I was sent to film the event and the University's President interacting with him. Well the VP's people didn't want every camera man gumming up the works so during the time when Biden and Leath were together there were only 2 cameras allowed to film them, one from the news affiliates, one from the University. I let the College of Engineering guy take the University position. What I didn't realize was my choice doomed me to standing in p...

This week the Foundation mailed out the first issue of its new magazine, "Forward," and coinciding with its release is the release of my first videos for the Foundation. As I've stated before, The ISUf's main purpose is to raise funds for Iowa State. For scholarships, for facilities, for endowed faculty, for programs, etc. "Forward" Magazine is meant to highlight the cool things ISU is doing and keep donors informed about where their funds are going. It's a pretty cool magazine. I'll probably produce 5-6 more videos for the next issue which will mail in June. Up to this point I've been doing a lot of prep and planning for upcoming projects and reworking previous video material for different purposes, but the last couple of weeks I finally got to shoot a couple of videos. The one above and this one: These videos, along with 3 others I edited from old content, are supplemental material to an article discussing the use of...

After 5 years in the news-media I am out. Forever? Who knows. But for the forseeable future I'm a Multimedia Specialist for the Iowa State University Foundation . The Foundation is a non-profit fundraising entity that raises funds for the University and helps promote its mission. My role is to produce multimedia content to that end; videos, presentations, advertisements and more. It's really exciting, I've had some fun calling myself the Foundation's in-house documentarian. Today I took advantage of the beautiful weather and used my equipment for the first time. Shot a building on campus. Not for any specific project, just to learn the camera. After that I took five minutes and shot the weather on campus. Not a perfect video, but for my first DSLR filming experiment, I think it turned out well.

Six years ago, when I graduated from Iowa State, I was done. Like all college students I lightly   considered  going to grad school but after 16 straight years of classrooms, I was done. Fast forward to January 2, 2012 and I'm un-done, and If we're being literal the title of this post is a lie, I'm telecommuting. First Question: What am I studying? In 18 months I hope to receive a "Masters of Applied Science in Information and Communications Technology" with an emphasis in Software Design and Programming. Back before my brain tuned out math, somewhere around 9th grade, I wanted to be a computer programmer. During college my tech interests started to comeback but never in the career path sense. Well now they have. I don't want to be a computer programmer, I dont want to be a web designer, I want to build programs. I get all these ideas in my head and I have some of the skills but not all. Well in 18 months I will have those missing skills. Second Quest...