Graduation

I only had a few classes left to complete my Associates degree and I had to figure out what I was going to do next. I also needed to get a few extra credits beyond the quarterly classes. The university was putting on a writing seminar that was going to include a film script-writing segment. They were bringing in a professor named Andrew Quicke from a graduate university in Virginia called Regent. Little did I know how significant this would be for my future.

Andrew turned out to be a quirky Englishman who was so interesting that we loved just listening to him. We all wrote short film scripts and Andrew seemed so impressed that he talked to the Dean of Communications at Regent about how he could incentivize us to go there. The Dean offered us 25% scholarships.

There was one hiccup. Regent was only a Graduate school and I was only doing an Associates degree. However, Regent had a program called ASAP (Advanced Scholars and Professionals) by which, if you were already working in the business, you could attend Regent without an undergraduate degree. You would just get a Master’s without a BA. They said they would count my time with Procla-Media as working in the industry. So I began to pursue attending Regent.

I still had two more classes that I needed to complete before I got my Associates. I would be doing the School of Radio in Hawaii in the Fall and then I needed to do a video production internship. I decided to do the internship in Virginia so I could get acclimated to Virginia Beach in preparation to go to Regent. 

I had two options – the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), which is a large international television production company run by the same people that ran Regent on the same campus. The other place was a much smaller video production company in nearby Chesapeake. I decided to go with the smaller company.

Meanwhile, I took the School of Radio. YWAM had a radio station based in Hilo that was short-staffed, so those of us in the school were asked to take some shifts. We were just supposed to play music but we had to talk between songs. The station wasn’t on overnight but we would go over to Hilo on Saturday, run a shift, stay overnight and run a shift the next day. Laura would come with me. 

Let’s just say that they must have been really understaffed to put me on the radio. I’m much better at writing than speaking and under that kind of live pressure, it was not pretty. At the very least, I probably put some people to sleep. At worst, they lost significant market share.

We had an older American gentleman helping to run the Radio School who was experienced in radio. There were a few of us students in the school who were from British Commonwealth countries. One day we had an assignment to record something and all of us Commonwealth students got a deduction for not saying the word government correctly.

We were up in arms, not knowing why in the world. We discovered that Americans pronounce the first “n” in government. We had never said it that way or even knew that people did. Our teacher decided to listen to the BBC to see how they pronounced it. It turned out that some announcers did say it and some didn’t. Giving us the benefit of the doubt, he reversed the deduction.

The University had a graduation ceremony after every quarter. Since they ran on a quarterly system, if people had finished their coursework, they could graduate after any particular quarter. I was allowed to attend the ceremony pending my internship. There were four of us that December. We were presented with our degrees and, in the Hawaiian tradition, our necks were loaded up with flower leis.

Graduation with Mom and Professor Jean Hartley


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