The Politics and Media undergraduate degree is the latest addition to the CMC family. In what seems like no time at all the very first cohort of students are getting ready to start their second year. The students have been hard at work and play over the year, as one of the students Alison Smith reflects on here:
Tuesday 25th September 2012. DAY ONE. Dear Diary. Seventeen undergraduate students on the first day of Bournemouth University’s brand new Politics and Media degree. To break the ice the teaching team set us a task. Start a university politics society: there isn’t one. Bournemouth University, we are informed, is not the hot bed of political activism it could be. In fact there hasn’t been anything ‘political’ since Conservative Futures fizzled out at the end of the last academic year.
Politics & Media students recruit for the new Politics Society
Saturday 29th September 2012.FRESHER’S FAIR. The embryonic Politics Society has a stall and a mission to recruit members. We wear our new branded polo shirts and look pretty slick. We try various techniques to attract the attention of passers-by with varying degrees of success. By the end of the day we have over 70 members.
Politics & Media students on the sofa for an interview with student journalist.
Tuesday 6th November 2012. US ELECTIONS. We all have election fever. We eat, sleep and breathe US politics. It’s US Election 2012: 24 hours of live TV and radio broadcast from the Media School. We’ve been drafted as political pundits and any moment now we’ll be live. By 3am it’s clear that Obama and Biden are staying in the White House. We’re sitting on a sofa under some hot lights, cabled up with lapel mics. There are four TV cameras pointing at us.
Politics and Media students at the front to hear the report.
Thursday 29th November 2012. LEVESON REPORT. It is a freezing cold morning. We’re standing outside the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre. There is a vast media presence and Hugh Grant is inside. It is history in the making and we are sitting alongside Lord Hunt of Wirral and Robert Jay QC as Lord Justice Leveson delivers his report on the Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press.
Students with Steve Barclay MP during the Eastleigh by-elections.
Wednesday 27th February 2013. EASTLEIGH BY-ELECTION. We’re in Eastleigh ‘undercover’ volunteering for the Conservative campaign. The by-election is tomorrow. Elected Westminster politicians had been arriving in spades, we meet, shake hands with, and are posed for photographs with more than we can remember. We walk the suburbs of Eastleigh for eight hours wearing our blue rosettes pushing leaflets in letterboxes, some of which are boarded up; so fed-up are the residents of Eastleigh with the election.
Politics & Media students rehearse for a live political panel show that they produced as part of ‘Experiencing Politics’, a second-term unit on the first year of the degree.
Wednesday 1st May 2013. SHOWTIME. We find it hard to believe that in 7 short weeks we’ve not only learnt how to produce a TV show, but we’re pretty proficient at it. It’s lunchtime and we’re eating on the go, running cabling for the camera positions. In six hours all the skills and experience need to come together this evening as we film our own political panel show in front of a live studio audience that includes the Dean of the Media School Stephen Jukes.
Politics & Media students behind the scences as they prepare to produce the live politics panel show.