Select Page

President’s Corner for September 2016

If you’re like most BEA members, you became a BEA member because you realized that BEA could help you with your career. Maybe you participate in the Festival of Media Arts to have your creative work peer reviewed. Maybe you enjoy presenting your research at the national convention. Maybe you enjoy the perk of visiting all of the NAB exhibits while you attend the BEA convention. Or maybe you just enjoy being around colleagues who share the same interests and passions that you have for our field.

Once you became a member, you may have found additional reasons to be a part of BEA. And that’s one reason I’m writing today. The BEA Board of Directors is constantly looking for new ways to serve you and other broadcast educators. To do so, we need your input on what more BEA can do for you. As I write this, the BEA Board is entertaining a wide range of proposals, from adding interest divisions dealing with religious broadcasting or video games to providing production services such as music libraries and sound effects libraries. We have initiatives that will create new opportunities for graduate students at our convention and that will increase the diversity of BEA membership.

So I’m asking for your input: What can BEA do for you that it is not doing right now? At one point, we were a much smaller organization, then the addition of the Festival of Media Arts allowed us to better serve faculty who produce creative work. At one point, we had only a handful of interest divisions, then interested faculty created new interest divisions for production, communication technologies, and sports.

If you have a specific idea about how BEA can be more useful to you, please let me know:

Now, I want to ask for something in return. As a membership-based organization, BEA is constantly in need of new members so that we can provide more member services to everyone in our field. The best way to get there is for you to introduce a colleague to BEA. And the best way to do that is to propose a panel for next April’s convention. In fact, you have the opportunity to propose a panel that includes four (or more) colleagues who would benefit from attending the conference; the only requirement is that your panel idea be as relevant to other BEA members as possible.

You should also encourage your colleagues to submit creative work to the Festival of Media Arts (contest window 11/15/16-12/15/16) and their research (deadline 12/1/2016) or research in progress (deadline 12/15/2016). If every member finds just one new person to participate in BEA, we have a chance to build the base of BEA so that we can provide even more services.

Here’s your to-do list for the week:

  1. Let me (or another member of the BEA Board) know what type of service we can add to make your BEA membership even more valuable.
  2. Create a panel proposal this week that will include people who have never been to BEA.

If you accomplish both tasks, you’ll help us make great strides in making your BEA membership more useful to you—and to all other members and prospective members.

Thank you for being a BEA member! Everyone on the BEA Board is looking forward to hearing from you!

Augie Grant
September 2016

Verified by ExactMetrics