[Now last night because I wrote this rather slowly] I was honored to be invited to the Cal State Fullerton Communications Department Awards, where I received the $1,000 Jay Berman Daily Titan Scholarship.
Yeah, that really just about sums it all up. Fastest blog post I’ve ever written.
Good night everybody.
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Okay fine, I can’t just leave it at that. But I am pretty tired so I’ll aim to keep it concise.
I took my Mom to Fullerton this afternoon for my 4:00 p.m. class because she was my +1 at the 6:00 p.m. awards.
That’s probably a good place to start, even though I don’t have too much to say about it since I wound up having to go down into the basement of College Park and couldn’t hang out with her.
After getting my full ensemble on in the parking lot, we took arguably the best photo of myself I think I’ve ever seen. It’s the featured image here, but here’s the full shot too:
Looking good, me. Looking good.
The awards took place in the Titan Student Union Pavilions (just across from the Mammoth fossil in the lobby, which we also got a photo with).
Slightly blurry while blown up, but it’s still nice.
The three-hour event actually ran well on schedule all things considered, so it felt like the smoothest awards ceremony I’ve ever been to. The first hour or so was dinner as the large banquet hall filled in.
I’m no Instagram food blogger so I didn’t actually get a photo of the dinner spread. It was nicely catered, though. Chicken, mashed potatoes, bread, salad and three kinds of cake. Nothing too unusual and not necessarily stellar, but it was passable.
The cake was real good though, I’ll give it that much.
All three of the center tables right up by the stage were reserved for Daily Titan staff and guests, so we had a pretty nice view all night and were able to all gather together as the well-dressed clique we were.
See? Aren’t we all perdy? Us journalists clean up nice apparently.
As far as the actual awards themselves go, I don’t have too much to say. Obviously I’m not here to summarize two hours worth of accolades that mostly went to people I don’t know.
In terms of the people I do know, I have to give some love to our current Editor in Chief Kyle for grabbing a bunch of recognition for his leadership, our current Managing Editor Sarah for her super high graduating GPA, News Editors Amy and Brandon, Web Editor/Clickbait God Harrison, Advertising Director Niko, my ex-News Editing partner/veteran Megan and, of course, our ex-EIC Zack for being my Berman Award buddy.
Hoo boy, that’s a lot of people… Hopefully I didn’t forget anybody from the group up above.
Ah, wait I did forget somebody. Arguably the most important person in relation to our experiences on the Daily Titan:
That’s right, our advisor Bonnie got the love she absolutely deserved tonight. If there’s anyone I could think of that deserves a Distinguished Faculty Member award, it’s undoubtedly her.
Don’t we look cute together?
I know I keep bringing up how everyone looks. What can I say, I think we all looked great in our cocktail attire tonight.
The other stand-out thing from tonight tied back to our Emcee, Henry DiCarlo. He’s an anchor for KTLA 5 and a Daily Titan alum who essentially wound up being a glorified raffle machine for the ceremony, handing out prizes a number of times throughout the event to break up all the awards.
It’s going to sound ridiculous without having been there, but he helped Del Taco become a meme.
That’s right, Del Taco. The fast food Mexican joint.
Del Taco was one of the sponsors of the night (with Chief Marketing Officer Barry Westrum in the room) and happened to provide a lot of gift cards to be given away. When the first one was announced, however, Niko made such a huge outcry of excitement that DiCarlo picked up on it and ran with the moment.
From there, every single raffle prize had an aside related to Del Taco in some way or another, and it resonated quite well with the audience.
Extra shout out to Mia for really being that perfect hype man.
Now that, I believe, is all she wrote. Like I started off this post saying, I was honored to get invited to the ceremony, and I’m hopefully looking forward to coming back next year as well!
However, until then I can still look forward to the Society of Professional Journalists award ceremony on Saturday where I am also slated to win something.
Busy weekend.
Jason's Blog - Work in Progress 