Faculty, May 2008:

Dr. M.C. Santana's work was chosen to be displayed in in the Orlando Museum of Art. The title of the exibit is Art < 12 Small Works/Large Images will be displayed on June 5 from 6 pm to 9 pm and will be for one night only.

Faculty, May 2008:

Director and Professor Mary Alice Shaver and husband, Assistant Professor of Journalism Dan, are leaving the School and Florida to move to the Media Management and Transformation Centre located in the Jonkoping International Business School in Jonkoping, Sweden. Both will be professors in the Business School while working at the centre for the next five years. The NSOC wishes them both well as they begin their new adventure.

Dean Peter Panousis recently announced that Dr. Bruce Whisler will assume the position of Interim Director for NSOC. He is a former chair of the Music Department at UCF, has served as Assistant to the Dean and more recently has been Budget Coordinator for Academic Affairs. Whisler began as Interim Director on April 28th and will continue until the search has closed and a new Director appointed. Welcome, Dr. Whisler.

Faculty, April 2008:

Dr. Harry Wegers manuscript that he co-authored with John Seiter, The Effect of Generalized Compliments, Sex of Server, and Size of Dining Party on Tipping Behavior in Restaurants, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

Undergraduate, July 2008:
Ryan Pelham, a summer 2008 graduate of the Journalism program, has accepted a job as a photojournalist at the New Britain, Conn., Herald, a community tabloid-format daily paper owned by the Journal Register Company. Pelham won first prize in the SPJ Mark of Excellence Region 3 competition for Breaking News Photography. He also won several awards for photojournalism in J-Day and Knight Image Awards competitions.

Alumni, July 2008:
Jessica Malavé (2005, Ad/PR) has joined Access Advertising/PR as a Design and Public Relations Account Executive. Prior to joining the Roanoke, Virginia, based advertising and public relations firm, she served as an Account Executive for the South Florida based advertising firm, Engelhardt & Partners.

Undergraduate, July 2008:

The Orlando Sentinel on Thursday expanded its partnership with the Journalism Division of UCF's Nicholson School of Communication.

Starting this fall, the news company's Web site, OrlandoSentinel.com, will offer expanded coverage of UCF by publishing news produced by UCF journalism students, with supervision from their professors.

The "U-News" page and its content will be produced and managed by students in the Journalism Division's advanced reporting and editing classes. Students will report about the people, events, issues and trends shaping and affecting Florida's second-largest university and its surrounding community. The UCF student population is expected to top 50,000 this fall.

The move represents a significant change for the Sentinel and UCF's Journalism Division. For the past two years, the Sentinel has published a half-page of student-produced UCF news in the regional sections of the newspaper. The move to the Web site will greatly increase both the number of stories and the ability to tell those stories with all of the tools of the digital age: text, photos, video and audio. It also means UCF journalism students will have a much larger audience for their news stories. The Orlando Sentinel reaches 1.2 million people each week in print and online.

"Journalism is changing," said Roger Simmons, the Sentinel's Associate Managing Editor for Online and a UCF alumnus (Liberal Studies, 1997). "The Web has become such a vital part of how people receive their news and information. We hope this partnership with UCF will not only help prepare a new generation of journalists but also help our community gain greater insight and understanding of the issues and events at one of our nation's top universities."

The partnership with the Sentinel adds to the growing vitality of UCF's journalism program, which is already a designated training center for the prestigious  Dow Jones Newspaper Fund copy-editing internship program.

"This is an enormous opportunity for UCF," said Rick Brunson, Journalism Division area coordinator, who will teach the U-News classes with Dr. Steve Collins. "It comes just as we are beginning to aggressively introduce multimedia storytelling skills across our curriculum. This partnership will help us better equip our students for the future and give them a digital platform on which to showcase their talents and serve their community as ethical and responsible journalists."