My story starts around the fact that most students at the University of Washington have a very tough time registering for classes, mainly because classes at the UW are very confusing to coordinate, some have random restrictions on them that students don’t know about until they register, and some are full even when they appear not to be. This is especially hard for Freshman, who unlike the older students, don’t have any experience and are basically being fed to the Sharks when they go out to register for classes.
My story continues by introducing Matt Lawson, a freshman political science major at the University of Washington who learned of a valuable tool that has significantly helped “ease the pain” to his registration process. It is a program called the Visual Schedule Finder, and was created by a fellow UW student, Rylan Hawkins. The program’s selling point is that it is an interactive tool to help you pick out each class you want one by one, choose your desired time frame, and then get fast results with a reliable schedule. It eliminates many of the petty but very frustrating problems students occur on registration day which often lead them into unwanted schedules. Matt hopes that other students will eventually start using this program.
length: (2 min, 1 sec)
here is the link to the current video uploaded to YouTube: http://tr.im/mNH1
The problem with this is that YouTube only uploaded 1:50 out of the 2 min file. I’m sending a new one to Kathy, and hopefully that will be up soon!
My goals were to create a good news story around this topic but also to promote the Visual Schedule Finder program itself. I definitely had reporting challenges in the way, mainly in that I wasn’t able to line up an interview with Rylan Hawkins, the program’s creator. Other than that, it was hard getting a lot of b-roll shots that I felt did a great job representing the student body during registration time- I wasn’t filming during the registration season, so I wasn’t able to get any action shots of students doing so. I think that would have been a great thing to get if I was to do this project again.
