SMPA is a pioneering teaching and research leader. Professor Silvio Waisbord is Editor of the International Journal of Press/Politics, an interdisciplinary journal for the analysis and discussion of the role of the press and politics in a globalized world.
Gain access to countless career opportunities
Students at our annual Communications Career Expo network with a CNN recruiter. SMPA helps students pursue rewarding careers in media, journalism, and communications via internships, networking events, and employment workshops.
Collaborate with faculty on research and special projects
Graduate student Rachel Weisel and Professor Kimberly Gross, in partnership with the Project for Excellence in Journalism, studied how the media uses Twitter. Their findings were published in a groundbreaking report that garnered national press coverage.
World-class speakers and events provide invaluable perspective
Students line up outside GW's Lisner Auditorium before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates speak at an event hosted by SMPA. The event was broadcast on CNN.
Learn and operate industry-standard broadcasting equipment and software
SMPA Faculty and staff use the flash studio for live and recorded professional programming.
World-class speakers and events provide invaluable perspective
Longtime political reporter and broadcaster Gwen Ifill of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer addresses students.
World-class speakers and events provide invaluable perspective
CNN's Christiane Amanpour and SMPA Director Frank Sesno interview five former U.S. Secretaries of State, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Warren Christopher, Henry A. Kissinger and James A. Baker III. The free event was sponsored by SMPA.
Study media in heart of Washington, and the world
SMPA is home to Prime Movers Media, an organization that sends student interns and media professionals to public high schools in Washington, D.C. to teach journalism.
The end of last week marked the biggest and one of the final steps in my GW career as a graduating Political Communication major. I hosted my very first documentary preview screening for my film, "Verge of Existence." The piece, funded by the first ever Manheim-Sterling Undergraduate Research Prize, looks into the lives of LGBTQ homeless youth living in New York City. As I spent hours last week in the edit bays of the 5th floor, I couldn't help but realize that these may be some of the last moments I would edit here. And as the hours ticked by, I felt a strange sense of nostalgia for the many hours I had already spent in SMPA over the last four years.
Sara sat on a panel as a student filmmaker.
While I may have been the kid who knew from the minute I stepped onto GW's campus that I wanted to come here, I couldn't have predicted the amazing opportunities and path I would take as an SMPA student. Thinking I was going to be a political reporter, I pursued my first internship with a local government as their communications intern. Almost as soon as I had signed on, I was ready to be done with this whole government thing. And this experience left me quickly without a dream job.
But with the support of some of the best SMPA faculty and the Internship Database, I began to find my footing right where my heart had been set the entire time. My mini-documentary from Jason Osder's class landed in the National Film Festival for Talented Youth in 2011, and I got to sit on a panel called "Out of the Closet, Onto the Screen" as an 'expert' student filmmaker. I traveled to Chattanooga, TN with Bridgett Lynn to see what made the newest Volkswagen Plant the first LEED Platinum Auto Plant in the world. I did all of this while interning with amazing companies like Prime Movers Media, Planet Forward, Spark Media, Believe Out Loud and National Geographic Society.
Sara at her documentary's preview screening.
But none of these opportunities would have meant anything without having incredible peers in both Political Communication and Journalism who pushed me to be my best. Production partners, classmates, friends and colleagues have been some of my greatest collaborators, toughest critics and most loyal fans that I have grown to respect and admire. By the time you take Senior Seminar, it is no longer just a class but a weekly family gathering.
When the lights went down and the music started playing from my film, I was overwhelmed by how many familiar faces filled my audience. I have felt so much love and support from my classmates and all of the amazing professors that helped me reach my full potential in this program.
I have never felt more proud to be part of a community like SMPA. People always say that SMPA majors have more SMPA pride than GW pride, and I can certainly say that I've felt that last week. There is no place I have been more proud to call home than the School of Media and Public Affairs.
This year, we awarded over $80,000 in scholarships and awards to some of our most well-deserving students.
Sherman Page Allen Scholarship
These awards are given to undergraduates who display a desire to specialize in the field of journalism. They were endowed in 1966 through a bequest from the estate of Violet B. Robinson. Ana Cvetkovic
Sarah Ferris
Audrey Scagnelli
Cory Weinberg
Gridiron Foundation Scholarship
These merit-based scholarships were created in 1975 by the Gridiron, a long-standing organization of Washington-based journalists. Stacey Buell
Zinhle Essamuah
Kevin Frey
Brianna Gurciullo
Chanelle Havey
Sophia Omuemu
Amelia Williams
Schneider-Taylor Scholarship
This scholarship, established by the parents of a recent graduate, provides "need-based" aid to an undergraduate in SMPA. Michelle Cho
Philip L. Graham Fund Scholarship for Diversity
Named for the late publisher of the Washington Post, these awards are given to students from underrepresented groups, including women and individuals of diverse backgrounds. Bryan Almeida
Dorothy and Will Roberts Prize
This prize was created by Professor Steve Roberts in the name of his parents. It is given to graduating seniors who have demonstrated academic achievement, professional promise and community service. Ana Buling
Eugenia Finizio
Ian Gray
Hyacinth Mascarenhas
Sandi Moynihan
Amanda Sawit
Elizabeth Traynor
Hoberman Prize
Created by the family of a recent graduate, this is a merit-based award recognizing an SMPA student who has produced original and meaningful journalism. The prize honors reporting that demonstrates depth, originality and a connection to community. Sara Snyder
Eaton Foundation Scholarship
This merit-based scholarship provides aid for both undergraduate and graduate students in the School of Media and Public Affairs. Doug Remley
Kara Dunford
Freedman Family Scholarship
This award was endowed by Mike Freedman, a former vice president of GW and SMPA professor, who is also the father of an SMPA graduate. It is awarded to a student with financial need who wants to become a professional journalist. Elizabeth Rawson
Larry King Scholarship
Created by the former CNN host who never attended college, this award goes to rising seniors with demonstrated financial need who have superior academic records. Ethan Bursofsky
Jillian Harclerode
Eleanor Klibanoff
Henry Morillo
Ali Mortell
Clara Pak
John Torrisi
Casey Wood
Essary Prize
SMPA's oldest prize, created in 1948 to honor the memory of Jesse Frederick Essary, is awarded to students who have given the promise of sound citizenship and ability in forthright reporting. Sarah Ferris, for her many exclusive investigative stories in the GW Hatchet
Ian Gray, for his contributions to the Huffington Post
Eleanor Klibanoff, for her dispatches from Nicaragua, especially her feature about a criminal-turned-artist
SMPA/Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Fellowship
This fellowship awards an undergraduate student up to $4,000 to cover an under-reported international story and to travel to that part of the world to get the facts. Eleanor Klibanoff, who will travel to El Salvador and Nicaragua to report on women's healthcare and the effect of the countries' abortion laws. After abortion was made illegal in 2006, maternal health has declined and the number of mothers under age 15 has risen 48 percent. Klibanoff has interned for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague and for The Nicaragua Dispatch. She is a member of GWU's University Honors Program.
SMPA senior Elizabeth Traynor, a native of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, was upset that she couldn't be with her family at the finish line for her mother's first marathon. When she received a call Monday afternoon, she thought her brother was informing her of her mother's success; instead he told her that he and their father were okay in the aftermath of a bomb blast.
Traynor's brother and father had been standing just feet away from the bombs and were separated after the blast. Her brother stopped to help a woman up from the ground. Her mother finally stopped running and asked a stranger to borrow a cell phone. Traynor's family eventually reunited.
As she walked along a DC sidewalk in a Red Sox baseball cap, a stranger stopped Traynor to give her a hug.
She wrote in a piece for The Washington Post: "I know that this city is strong. It's beautiful and it is stubborn. We Bostonians may have woken up to a changed reality, but we're just as proud and scrappy and tightly knit as we were yesterday."
"Believe in Boston. Because it's not going anywhere."
To read the rest of Traynor's blog post, click here and scroll down.
It's scholarship and awards time at SMPA! Apply for as many of the opportunities listed below as you feel appropriate. Many of these awards are worth thousands of dollars.
Fill out the online application below and check off as many awards for which you want to be considered. Each application should include the following: a transcript (does not have to be official), a letter outlining your accomplishments, professional goals and an explanation of how you meet the requirements of each award. Where applicable, include a portfolio of published journalistic work. Please read through the application first before beginning it.
All applications should be submitted no later than 8 PM on Friday, March 22.
Larry King Scholarships
Created by the former CNN host who never attended college, this award goes to rising seniors with demonstrated financial need who have superior academic records.
Sherman Page Allen Scholarships
These awards are open to all undergraduate majors if they display a desire to specialize in the field of journalism. They were endowed in 1966 through a bequest from the estate of Violet B. Robinson.
Gridiron Foundation Scholarships
These scholarships were created in 1975 by the Gridiron, a long-standing organization of Washington-based journalists. All undergraduate majors are eligible to apply for these merit-based awards, but consideration will be given to need and minority status.
Schneider-Taylor Scholarship
This scholarship, established by the parents of a recent graduate, provides "need-based" aid to an undergraduate in SMPA.
Eaton Foundation Scholarship
This merit-based scholarship provides aid for both undergraduate and graduate students in the School of Media and Public Affairs.
Philip L. Graham Fund Scholarship for Diversity
Named for the late publisher of the Washington Post, these awards give preference to students from underrepresented groups, including - but not limited to - women and individuals of diverse backgrounds.
Freedman Family Scholarship
This award was endowed by Mike Freedman, a former vice president of GW and SMPA professor, who is also the father of an SMPA graduate. It gives preference to a student with financial need who wants to become a professional journalist.
Essary Prize
SMPA's oldest prize, created in 1948 to honor the memory of Jesse Frederick Essary. It is awarded "to a student who has given promise of sound citizenship and ability in 'forthright reporting.'" This is a writing award, open to all SMPA students, and a portfolio of published or broadcast work outside of class assignments is required.
Hoberman Prize
Created by the family of a recent graduate, this is a merit-based award recognizing an SMPA student who has produced original and meaningful journalism. That work can take any form—print, video, audio, photography or a combination of multimedia platforms. The prize will honor reporting that demonstrates depth, originality and a connection to community—either local or global.
Dorothy and Will Roberts Prize
This prize was created by Professor Steve Roberts in the name of his parents. It is given to graduating seniors who have demonstrated academic achievement, professional promise and community service.
SMPA/Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Fellowship
Are you interested in covering an under-reported international story and traveling to that part of the world to get the facts? Apply now for the 2012-2013 School of Media and Public Affairs/Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting International Reporting Fellowship. All SMPA undergraduates (including current seniors) are now eligible to receive up to $4,000 to report on a story of your choice.
Our partner, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, is interested in reporting projects that focus on topics and regions of global importance, with an emphasis on issues that have gone unreported or under-reported in the mainstream American media. They see great value in covering systemic crises like environmental issues and struggles for resources, human rights abuses, post-conflict reconstruction, or brewing ethnic tensions. They are interested in the stories that would typically not make the headlines without the Pulitzer Center's support.
The Pulitzer Center staff will work with the Fellow to further refine the project and to offer distribution avenues via their online platforms. This could be your chance to be published by multiple news outlets. Applicants must be current SMPA undergraduate majors as of February 2013. All travel should be completed by December 31, 2013.
Read the work of last year's Pulitzer Center Fellow, Melissa Turley, who traveled to South Africa to investigate the lives of women who are playing a role in advancing their country. Watch one of her audio slideshows below.
(Update, 1/2/13, applications are no longer being accepted for this cycle.)
Named in honor of two legendary SMPA faculty members, the new Manheim-Sterling Undergraduate Research Prizes are designed to support and encourage outstanding mentored undergraduate research and creative activity in the School of Media and Public Affairs. The School will award two prizes each academic year, one for a political communication major and one for a journalism/mass communication major. Students must have a faculty mentor for their project or be engaged in collaborative research with a faculty mentor to qualify for these awards. The awards are designed to afford students an opportunity to partake of the many benefits that result from undertaking a serious research project or creative work and from establishing a close mentoring relationship with a faculty member.
For one week I, along with seven other SMPA alumni, acted as an ambassador for Planet Forward and GW in Germany. Our job was to learn all that we could about Germany’s culture of environmental sustainability through the work of the Volkswagen Group. The end product will be a series of videos and blogs, each produced by members of our group that focus on German attitudes about clean energy.
Nothing could prepare me for the series of tours and lectures we attended, each more informative than the last. We saw the production of a Volkswagen firsthand in Volkswagen’s first ever factory in Wolfsburg, Germany. Scientists gave us insight into new battery-powered cars, bicycles, and scooters. We spent half a day at the Autostadt, a living monument to Volkswagen’s extensive history and the highlight of any visit to the quiet town of Wolfsburg. We even took a couple vehicles for a spin.
We later traveled three hours to Berlin where we would learn about about its media, culture, and history for the next two and a half days. One of our guides was Frank Valentine Wahlig, senior political correspondent for the ARD, the world’s second largest public broadcaster behind the BBC. He showed us the sight of the Berlin Wall, the Bundestag, home of the German parliament, and some of Berlin’s most beautiful architecture. We also enjoyed the best cuisine Germany had to offer. Later that week, we visited a community garden in the heart of Berlin and the Ministry of Energy, a visit that was of satisfaction to my wonky side.
As I sift through all my notes and audio from that week, I am much more appreciative of the opportunity awarded to me and my peers. A special thanks goes to Planet Forward, Volkswagen, my fellow SMPA alumni, and others who were instrumental in making this all possible.
As their final project for Professor Jason Osder's Spring 2012 Introduction to Digital Media Production class, students Matthew Kwiecinski (JMC '14), Max Schwager (JMC '14), and Zoe Valentine (PCM '14) created a short documentary about Twitter use on the campus of The George Washington University. For the film, the students interviewed Peter Konwerski, Dean of Students, Tim Miller, Associate Dean of Students (CSE), and Lorraine Voles, Vice President for External Relations.
Journalism and Mass Communication senior Stephanie Linka’s final assignment for her “Social Media” class is an academic project on how one Internet video went viral – that is going viral in its own right. Now at over 1000 views, her video chronicles the rise in popularity of Internet phenomenon “Caine’s Arcade,” the short film about of a young boy in East Los Angeles whose cardboard arcade games have inspired both children and adults around the world.
Senior Stephanie Linka's web project drew over a thousand views in a week.
In her project, Stephanie drew on her background as a PR firm intern to calculate the viewer impressions the original film had and integrated that data into her classroom studies of social network theory. Using photos and music and iMovie, she condensed her findings into a 3:35 minute video incorporating the theories of experts Clay Shirky and Henry Jenkins, among others. Once the project was online, class professor Dr. Nikki Usher tweeted the work out to the same experts mentioned in the original film, as well as the original filmmaker himself.
“For this class, I didn't want to assign students a traditional paper. In keeping with the idea of social media, what they produced had to be spreadable and sharable,” said Professor Usher. “I wanted to see how they could apply course concepts and theories to explain real online and ICT (information and communication technology) phenomenons-- as well as some of their offline interests.”
To her great surprise, as the link was tweeted and retweeted by those experts and other interested fans, Stephanie’s own work quickly gained its own popularity.
“You don’t necessarily think a project you make for a class will reach the academics you quote, but today we have all these tools that allow us to converse directly with the people we’re reading,” Stephanie said. “College and academic work isn’t as stagnant and isolated as I thought it was before this project.”
Stephanie, who graduates this week and will soon begin a teaching position with Teach for America in Baltimore, was drawn to the original short film because of her interest in children and the entrepreneurial spirit shown by the little boy in the film, Caine Monroy. Not only has the original film had over a million views, but a foundation and a scholarship fund have raised thousands of dollars from people inspired by the film’s story. Filmmaker Nirvan Mullick showed Stephanie’s video to a gathering of the foundation’s supporters last weekend.
“Taking your academic texts and finding out how far you can take them into the real world is important part of today’s learning environment,” Stephanie said.
SMPA Journalism & Mass Communication senior Reid Davenport dreamed of studying abroad in Italy during his junior year. After GW accepted his application, he was informed by the study abroad administrators in Florence that much of the country was not wheelchair accessible. Davenport, who often relies on a wheelchair due to cerebral palsy, was discouraged from traveling abroad. Rather than give up, Davenport decided to confront the issue with a camera.
Utilizing the skills he learned in School of Media and Public Affairs’ assistant professor Jason Osder’s “Introduction to Digital Media Production” course, Davenport choose to create a documentary exploring the lack of handicapped accessibility in Europe. He resolved to travel to Europe on his own to complete the project.
To fund his documentary and the traveling it would require, Davenport first applied for and received a $5,000 Luther Rice Collaborative Fellowship from the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. He then sought to raise a matching amount of funds using Kickstarter, a website that crowdsources funding for creative projects. The online fundraising campaign exceeded his expectations, raising over $8,000 from more than 150 donors.
“He has exceeded expectations at every juncture,” says Professor Osder, who serves as Davenport’s faculty advisor. “Reid is very much an overachiever.”
Thanks to the support he received, Davenport spent three weeks in January with a cameraman traveling to Dublin, Brussels, Naples, Florence, and Paris to document the challenges of navigating Europe in a wheelchair. He also interviewed 13 Europeans knowledgeable about the issue, ranging from a fellow college student in a wheelchair to a director of a disability advocacy group, to explore the problems and potential solutions further.
His trip was not without struggles. While there, he grappled with airport security, a broken wheelchair, and finding handicapped-accessible public transportation and taxis.
“I experienced my fair share of overwhelming challenges during my trip,” says Davenport. “I hoped to capture and portray those challenges in the documentary.”
When asked what he hopes to achieve with his film, titled Wheelchair Diaries, Davenport explains, “I want to share with viewers the experience of living with a disability, and try to catalyze change for accessibility. I also hope viewers not only get a sense of how different it is to be disabled, but despite our differences, see how much we all are the same.”
Davenport currently is editing the final version of the film, but it already has garnered praise. During GW Research Days last week, he presented his documentary’s rough cut, which earned him the third-place prize in the Undergraduate Humanities and Creative Arts poster contest for his work. He is planning a premiere screening in late-April for his donors and friends to see the finished product. Professor Osder believes it will be a great success.
“Wheelchair Diaries truly is an extraordinary project,” he says. “I feel confident we will see his documentary in many film festivals in the future.”
The School of Media and Public Affairs, Planet Forward, and National Geographic have partnered on a new project called National Geographic Virtual Studios. Using media from National Geographic's scientists and explorers, students are able to create short web videos highlighting topics ranging from conservation to exploration. The ultimate goal of the project is to inspire others to care more about our planet.
Gabriella Demczuk, a student in SMPA Director Frank Sesno's Planet Forward class, has created the first Virtual Studio video. Using footage and interviews from National Geographic's archives, she produced “Deforestation: Saving Madagascar's Forests,” demonstrating how National Geographic's Dr. Luke Dollar works to save the rare planets and animals that make the forests their home. Her video can be viewed on National Geographic's website.
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