Bye-Bye Berkeley! Thanks for Everything
Fifteen years is a nice, round number. It’s also a long time to work somewhere. In this case, fifteen is the right number of years for me to do what I needed to do with my work at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
When I started teaching at the Jschool, I was a brand new graduate trying to get funding for my first feature documentary. I was also thinking about starting my family. Within a few years of my time teaching at the Jschool, I had done both.
I started out teaching Pro Tools at the Jschool in the radio department, because before Jschool I’d had a whole career working as an audio engineer/producer/editor in SF and then Silicon Valley. Within a year of my start at the school my enthusiastic students requested that I teach some video classes as well as audio classes, since video was the bulk of the work I was doing post Doc Program at the school. And so it began.
My ongoing part time appointment as a Continuing Lecturer at Berkeley was the perfect job for this period of time in my life, which I consider to be, in many ways, my years of service, of tending, of nurturing. As I labored at home first birthing and then raising all 3 of my kiddos (now 6, 10 and 13) I had the great privilege of teaching and then working with many of my students (turned colleagues) over the years.
Beyond the students, I feel lucky to have worked with so many brilliant colleagues… And then of course my own teachers who became my colleagues when I started teaching - Bob, Joan, Linda, Jon, Neil, Paul. Working alongside them was surreal, and also informative - that’s when I really got to peek behind the curtain of Oz and see how the magic is made.
In short, the UCB Jschool is one enormous, loud, crazy, multi-faceted, endlessly entertaining, interconnected, and sometimes a little quarrelsome (what do you expect, it’s a bunch of journalists!?) family, and although I won’t be holding court in the TV lab every week any longer, I will forever be around and available to all my students and the community as a whole. All of my students know that I like to stay in touch - so please, find me on Instagram or keep me up to date on IG, Facebook, LinkedIn, and of course, HERE on my website where you can sign up for my newsletter! (see below)
Now that my youngest has started kindergarten (as of this fall) and all 3 kiddos are in school all day, in person (!) I will finally have access to extended stretches of time to think, to work, to shoot, to travel, and to launch some new work - and I plan to really lean into my own work now. I have been waiting for this day for a long, long time, and let’s just say I cannot wait to get started on this next career phase.
Last night was my final fall showcase at the school. Showcases are a chance for the whole community to come together to watch the work of the TV/Doc students - and it was a remarkable final show. The level of storytelling just keeps getting better and better every year, and I am so proud of any small role I may have played in the careers of these generations of formidable journalists. At the end of the showcase, my students surprised me with a personal farewell video, flowers, and then a bunch of speeches from them and then also from my colleagues, and all of that was followed by an absolutely delicious dinner out with my Visual Journalism team and Dean Geeta Anand. Talk about going out with a bang. I couldn’t ask for anything more.
Thank you everyone for such an amazing ride. What a privilege it has been.