This fall, the Advanced Journalism class went to the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association conference also known as MIPA. This year, Michigan State University hosted MIPA in the Lansing Center. With a wide variety of classes, MIPA targets students that are taking journalism, photography, digital media/video, and yearbook.

A class that was available to all students was Creativity Can Change Education as You Know it, led by the DeWitt Creativity Group. This was a class that provided students with unique learning ideas, and emphasized the importance of embracing the student voice. Seniors from DeWitt were in charge of the class, and they shared how they get more feedback from the student body.

“I think it was really informative, they had a lot of cool ideas that would work really well at our school,” junior Julia Lively says.

Break into TV News was starring guest speaker Sherri Jones from channel 6 news. She was there to teach students how to act on television, and share how it is to be an anchor on a news show. This was a class was directed mainly towards students interested in the media.

“Learning about how you should look and act on television was cool to hear from someone who actually knows what they are doing,” senior Alexa Skonieski says.

As a staff writer for the Main Four, I got the opportunity to go to MIPA. One class that was really interesting to me was More Than a Theme. Sarah Nichols was the featured speaker for this class. She is the vice president of the national Journalism Education Association and student media advisor at a high school in California. She emphasized the importance of developing a theme for your newspaper. Nichols also gave many tips to creating a new theme and sticking to it throughout the year.

Besides proving information on what you should do, MIPA offered feedback to many schools. By going to experts that were available at MIPA, students were able to talk with them and show them their school’s work.

“Our newspaper website got critiqued by someone who really knew what he was doing,” senior Rachel Cichon says, “and he said as far as high school newspapers go, ours was pretty good.”

In general, MIPA is a great way to bring many students together for a fun learning experience. With the type of classes they offered, students were able to get a feel for what the real world of media is.

“I gained a lot of journalism knowledge that I can apply to the Main Four, but also had fun doing so,” junior Megan Killop says.