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Sometimes, the elephant in the room is a glass of orange juice. Or more likely, a glass with something added to the juice.

And standing in the door is a housing resident advisor (RA) caught in a tricky situation as the person in charge of both building community and enforcing alcohol regulations.

Alyssa Stephens (Comm, Wgst’18), who worked on campus as an RA for three years, explored the ways RAs navigate conversations with their residents about drinking in her senior honors thesis, titled, “So You Were Drinking ‘Orange Juice’: Resident Advisors’ Negotiation of Resident Drinking Norms.”

Stephens interviewed nine CU Boulder RAs and found they often tailor and shift roles depending on the individual resident they are speaking with. One female RA started using the phrase, “So, you were drinking ‘orange juice,’” as a way to discuss drinking.

RAs want to talk to residents about drinking to help students make good decisions, she says, but struggle with not wanting to hear about behavior that violates a rule.

“One of the most interesting findings from my project was the ways RAs use the idea of safety when talking about drinking,” she says. “Most resident advisors take a ‘safety first’ perspective and frame their conversations about drinking primarily around advice and concern for resident safety.”

Stephens recommends future studies to explore training models to prepare RAs for the realities they face.

In June, Stephens accepted a job as an academic advisor at the University of Alabama.

“Working as an RA on campus and in other campus leadership roles has definitely changed my life and is the main reason I want to pursue higher education as a career,” she says.

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When graduate student Matt Isola’s family friend, Ted, received an iPad for his 90th birthday, Isola volunteered to show him how to use the tablet. The experience was a revelation for both.

“It was like I showed him magic,” says Isola (MStratComm’18). “His eyes lit up when I showed him FaceTime. He had no idea this was possible, and it took almost nothing for me to recreate his imagination of the world.”

Soon after, Isola developed an idea to replicate the experience on a larger scale.

For his thesis project, he launched the Generation Exchange Technology Workshop—a series of free, public workshops where seniors are paired with student volunteers who teach them technological tricks to live more connected, independent and fulfilling lives.

Last spring, about 40 seniors from the community attended the first three sessions, bringing with them a range of devices and concerns.

Cole Gendelman (CompSci’18) works with local retiree Jeffrey Peacock to organize and back up photos as part of the Generation Exchange Technology Workshop, held last spring at CMCI Studio in downtown Boulder.

Richard Rocklin and Rebekah Sosa (MStratComm’18) take a selfie after Richard attended three consecutive workshops.

Retiree Jeffrey Peacock brought a laptop full of photos he wanted to sort and back up onto a hard drive. Working with alumnus Thomas Regur (Jour’14; MStratComm’17) made the task more manageable.

“I can talk to Thomas and he’s very patient,” Peacock said. “It really helps.”

Isola, who graduated in August, continues to host monthly workshops in partnership with the Strategic Communications Design master’s program.

“Our two generations fit perfectly together,” he says. “Where one generation may gain concrete technological skills, the other can gain perspective on how the world works.”

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Before that iconic red circle appears on the stage and speakers deliver punchy TedTalks, hundreds of hours of preparation take place behind the scenes.

“We didn’t know going into this what our theme would be, but through the process the stories revealed themselves,” says Colleen Campbell (Comm’18), volunteer speaker coordinator for “Game Changer: TEDxCU 2018.”

She served with four other CMCI and Leeds School of Business students on the 2018 TedxCU executive committee. Each year, the all-student committee—with the guidance of Department of Communication Instructor Jeff Motter—chooses and coaches speakers, develops a theme, produces the marketing and completes all other duties needed to pull off the event.     

TEDx events are organized independently but follow mandatory ground rules and branding guidelines set by TED. The students receive training and then coach speakers through the process of delivering their speeches to match the TedTalk style.

For Campbell, the intense months of planning before the April event were among her best experiences at CU. They also were supported by what she learned from her professors.

“As a communication major, community and bringing people together is central to what we do,” she says. “Whether behind the scenes helping to edit manuscripts or leading a team of students on the speaker committee, I feel confident in the skills my communication classes have given me.”

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For her Strategic Communications Campaigns class, Assistant Professor Jolene Fisher assigned students to pitch graphic and messaging ideas to a committee of representatives for Boulder County's first Food Waste Awareness Week.

The committee used student-made graphics on its website and social media channels to promote the week of sustainability-oreinted events. 

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Nick Mundinger pulls out his phone and opens an app that looks like a calculator. The screen is filled with colorful dials and buttons with labels like "tempo" and "chest".

“This is a sort of drum machine I made using different parts of my body,” he says, moving between the phone and a laptop as he sets up the program.

Each "drum" is a recording of a different action. For example, one plays a clap, another a snap, another a thump on his chest and so on. The dials on the phone control the probability that each drum will be played on each beat. Visualizations on the laptop screen show which sound is playing. When you hear the thump sound, you see Mundinger's fist on his chest. When you hear a clap, you see his hand. The end result—a beat controlled with the phone along with visualizations on the screen—is almost like a live music video.

Mundinger, a sophomore Media Production student, loves almost anything to do with music and sound. He grew up playing the violin and has since learned to play bass guitar, various percussion instruments and more.

“I like to make more contemporary music—music that people can dance to,” he says. “A lot of the projects here allow me to do stuff with sound. Faculty are pretty open, medium wise, because there are so many different types of people in the department.”

As a student in the Department of Critical Media Practices (DCMP), Mundinger has broadened his love of music into an exploration of various types of audio and other media. For one class, he created a large, wooden sculpture—complete with chimes and an old coffee tin—which he plays using drumsticks. The instrument is designed so that multiple people can play it at the same time.

While the wooden sculpture represents a low-tech take on sound and composition, Mundinger is also involved in a far more high-tech project called Sound Planetarium. The project—led by DCMP Associate Professor Tara Knight—will allow people to hear the sounds of the cosmos in all directions using virtual reality goggles and headphones. As an undergraduate research assistant for the project, Mundinger has learned skills like coding, in addition to expanding his knowledge of audio. 

“I guess I would call it almost, like, an interstellar synthesizer,” he says. “Every star has a temperature, color, distance and luminosity. They have all these variables that we can convert into musical things. The color of a star could control the pitch of the sound or the luminosity could control the volume of the sound. Each star is like its own instrument that makes its own sound based on the stellar data.”

Recently, Mundinger traveled to Los Angeles to help with virtual reality demonstrations and present a portion of the project at CU Boulder Next. While he’s only in his second year of the Media Production program, projects like the sound planetarium have helped Mundinger gain a sense of what he’d like to do in the future.

"After I leave college I want to become a music producer,” he says. “But I’m also interested in doing multimedia art with things like film, photography and graphic design.”

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