This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Miami (OH) chapter.
Cheryl Gibbs is an accomplished professor and professional with an insatiable academic curiousity and encouraging and supportive nature that makes Her Campus Miami (OH) lucky to have her as our publication’s Faculty Advisor.
HC: What do you do at the university?
CG: I teach journalism and serve as assistant director of the Journalism Program. That just means I help Director Richard Campbell with administrative stuff like scheduling, advising, making registration go as smoothly as possible for students, etc.
CG: I teach journalism and serve as assistant director of the Journalism Program. That just means I help Director Richard Campbell with administrative stuff like scheduling, advising, making registration go as smoothly as possible for students, etc.
HC: Where did you get your start?
CG: I got my start doing publicity for a theater company in Minneapolis while I was a theater major at the University of Minnesota. I ended up doing more publicity work in my first full-time job for the American Heart Association in Eureka, California, then transitioned into journalism after deciding I really should take some journalism classes so I could learn what I should have been doing all that time. At the end of the semester, my professor told me there was a job at the local paper and suggested that I apply. I did, and I got the job. An interesting bit of trivia: That professor was Alann Steen, who later was one of four university professors taken hostage in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1987 and was released in 1991.
HC: Why were you interested in advising Her Campus?
CG: I was fortunate enough to have Alaine Perconti in my online journalism class, and at the time she was writing for Her Campus and working toward establishing a Miami-based site. Her Campus represents an emerging business model in journalism — local sites that emanate from a central organization that provides a localizable content management system. In that way, it’s similar to Patch, an AOL project that now employes many Miami alums. I believe Her Campus is a great way for our students to get experience working within that kind of model. I also was especially impressed by Alaine and the caliber of the other student leaders in the organization, and I still am.
HC: How do you see digital-based magazines functioning in the future?
CG: Digital news sites, including magazines, will continue to evolve in ways that are likely to surprise me, since I didn’t grow up with computers. Technological innovations like wearable interfaces and geolocation applications have a lot of potential for good … but they also give me strange mental pictures sometimes, like zombie-like hordes wandering through King Library, typing on air keyboards as they have Web sites and virtual keyboards beamed onto their retinas. I am constantly amazed, though, by the things I see on various news sites — such cool ideas! The biggest challenge, of course, is still how digital news sites will make enough money to pay talented people to produce content and keep developing the tech.
HC: How would you like to see our chapter grow?
CG: I would just like to see Her Campus maintain its high leadership standards and grow as the leaders see fit. I’m a great believer that student-run media should be student-run, so I hesitate to impose any kind of suggestions on all of you!
HC: What advice do you have for young female writers at Miami University?
CG: Write. Then write some more. Then keep writing — as much as you possibly can. Experiment with different writing styles. Learn to write like you speak. Hone your voices — your impersonal, journalistic voice as well as your quirky, individual voice, along with any other voices you have, like your voice as a poet or fiction writer. Know when to use which voice. Nothing makes you a better writer than writing a lot, especially when the last thing you feel like doing is writing.
HC: What is something students can do to better their academic experiences?
CG: This is not on campus, but I think everyone should study abroad. Live at least for a while in another culture, where you don’t know the language (or don’t know it well). It’s humbling, but it also shows you how generous people can be. It also teaches you to see beauty in new ways.