Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
In response to the Covid-19 Pandemic, the faculty and staff of the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies began working from home and teaching online. Now that faculty and students are returning to campus and having more opportunities for face-to-face interactions, we almost feel like we need to re-introduce ourselves to our colleagues and students. The same is true for other schools and departments in the College of Urban Affairs and across the university. Since we boast a new podcasting studio and classes in podcasting, audio announcing, audio production, and audio storytelling, we believe that the best way to introduce ourselves is by sharing the personal stories and backgrounds of our faculty and staff. The goal is to introduce each of our faculty and staff members to students, the public, and each other. Starting with these podcasts, we hope to build a podcasting network devoted to helping students and the public meet the people who teach the classes, conduct the research, and manage media operations. We also hope to get to know each other better and build a richer academic community. So lend an ear to the personal stories of the faculty and staff preparing students for a promising future.
Kevin Stoker
Welcome to Inside JMS, the stories behind the people who work at the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies. I'm Kevin Stoker. I'm the director of the school. I'm here with my co host, Dave Nourse.
Dave Nourse
Always a pleasure, my friend.
Kevin Stoker
We are happy to have with us today. Matt Eichner, Dr. Matt Eichner, who joined us last January. Matt, how are you?
Matt Eichner
I'm doing great. Thanks, Kevin.
Kevin Stoker
Matt, as we were talking about, it's, it's, you know, it's not easy doing a journalism career. You know, you work at small papers, move the next size paper, and everything else, and then to decide to leave the business kind of because you did pick up the business again in Oregon and go back to school and get a PhD at Oregon. Tell me what inspired that for you to to take four kids and have four kids. You and your wife have four kids. Move from Idaho to Oregon to get a PhD.
Matt Eichner
Yeah, well, I was beginning to teach adjunct at the local university there in Rexburg, which is BYU, Idaho. And I was teaching a couple of classes adjunct. I was teaching a writing class, and I was teaching some photojournalism, but then started teaching the writing class, and I found that I really liked it, and I had gotten a master's it was in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University while I was working as the managing editor of the newspaper there. And so I got the master's degree, and I started teaching classes, and I really liked it. And I said I would like to do this full time professionally. And so I started looking around for a few jobs, but I didn't really get anything. I had a master's. I had experience and a Master's, but it wasn't enough to get me what I wanted. And I said, I need to get PhD if I want to teach at the collegiate level. And so I applies to, applied to a few different places, and I was accepted in a couple of different places. And I chose Oregon for a couple of reasons. One, I viewed it, viewed it as probably the best chance for me to be successful in my career. But two, my dad also had a place out there in the Oregon coast, in yahats, and so one of the nice things was being able to go and see them once a month, and we we'd we'd drive out to the coast, we'd pack up the family into the suburban and drive them out to the coast, and we had a great time. And that was one of the real joys of being in Oregon, was being able to see him when we hadn't. We'd spent a little bit of time around him when I was at a newspaper in Montana, but this was a this was a great time to spend time with him.
Kevin Stoker
Well, tell us where you grew up. You grew up in Montana, right?
Matt Eichner
I did. I grew up in Montana and grew up in Great Falls, Montana. And after, after high school, I started a collegiate career down in California. I went down to the Bay Area, Hayward California, and Chabot College.
Kevin Stoker
What? Now, wait. Montana to California?
Speaker 1
Well, my mom lived in my in California. So I was living with my dad in Montana, and my mom lived in California. And I said I kind of wanted a little bit of a change. So I went down to California, and it's a bit of a change. It was a little bit of a change. And I really enjoyed my time there at Chabot College. It was, it was great and and was able to take some classes, and I worked as a security guard in downtown Oakland, skinny, little, 160 pound, 19 year old, working security downtown Oakland, California. Bet you had a couple of stories from that. Well, you know, the funny thing was, is it was so quiet, I worked the night shift, or sometimes the evening shift, but more often than not, the night shift, and just being able to be downtown, and is like, you know, 11 to seven, and I had a lot of time to think, kind of wander around and I did my rounds, and not a lot happened. It was a quieter time back there, early 90s, and it was Oakland City Hall had been damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake, and so one of the buildings that I was responsible for was the replacement City Hall for the city of Oakland, which was there at the city center development, and so doing security in that. And I enjoyed it. I was saving some money because I wanted to go on a I went on a church mission after that. And after came back from Texas, I went back up to Montana, to Montana State, because my friends, I had a couple of friends there at Montana State, and so ended up with an English degree, and then moved back down to California. My first professional job was writing market studies and appraisals in San Francisco, California for an accounting firm. And that lasted for about a year, and I got kind of bored of that kind of writing, and I said, I want to do something fun, which was journalism. And so I. Actually got on at the Utah State journalism program. I I wanted to to start in journalism, and I was en route to a second bachelor's when life called, and I ended up, we ended up moving up near my wife's hometown, and I in Idaho, and I started working for the small newspaper there in sports, and quickly became the sports editor and moved on to another newspaper, The Great Falls Tribune. I worked there. It's a Gannett paper, and worked on site there before they disbanded all of their newsrooms and centralized everything and basically is a shell of what it used to be. And after working there for three years, I moved back down to Idaho and became the managing editor of a newspaper, The Rexburg standard journal. And I worked as managing editor for a few years. Went to the went to the Idaho Falls post register as their in their ad department, actually as their special sections editor. And so at that time, though, I had started doing the adjunct work, and so that's what led me into academia. Is my roundabout journalism career, working in a lot of different things, doing sports, doing news, writing a lot, producing some multimedia. And then, you know, being boss of the shop for a little while has given me a lot of insight into, you know, how the business works, and trying to build like principles of content to help gain and retain audiences. And that's been one of my focuses as I've been in academia, like translating some of these, some of my experiences, but also now linking it to some of the theory that I learned when I was at the University of Oregon, a little bit of Gonzaga, but mostly at the University of Oregon, you know, thinking about why content is made, if there are effects, but then also then the cultural aspects of society as well. So I felt like really grounded in some of the theory when it comes to, you know, Communication and Mass Media theory and, yeah, so that led me to Oregon and ended up in my first assistant professor job at Texas A and M University, Corpus Christi. I was there for nearly five years, and now I'm here. It's been a kind of a long and winding road. I'm sure that it's like, well, short answer long Yeah,
Dave Nourse
it's a podcast. Don't worry.
Matt Eichner
That's right, we I can elaborate a little. It's fine.
Dave Nourse
Yeah, we're trying to give Joe Rogan a run for his money.
Matt Eichner
We're gonna be here another two and a half hours, I'm sure.
Dave Nourse
So Matt, so many parts of your story are interesting. I want to just kind of dial in to the moment that you or maybe it's done a moment, but you're in that first job after school, right after your after your undergraduate experience, and it's not really pushing your buttons, and you're thinking, journalism is the kind of writing that I want to do, which means you're a storyteller, really, at heart, you're a storyteller. How did you get to that realization? I mean, you probably had a decent job, I would imagine, but it wasn't necessarily fulfilling. So what was what was missing, and how did the kind of journalism angle start to fulfill or scratch the itch that hadn't been scratched yet?
Matt Eichner
Yeah, I think that's a great word, fulfilling, because it wasn't, I mean, I enjoyed my time there. I really did. I mean, great folks, and I still have some fond memories. Um, there was kind of, I think, yes, there was the fulfilling aspect of it, but I wanted more exciting writing. I was doing similar things. We would we would go out to a site, we would look at the site and like, and then just basically create a document based on the appraisers, you know, methodology. And, yeah, I mean, it's boring. And so, yes, the journalism aspect of it is a lot more fun. Also, I wanted to go to sports events for free and get paid to go there, which I was able to accomplish, because covering sports allows me to do that. It's, I mean, eventually it becomes work, that's right. But the appeal of being able to attend sporting events for free from kind of a privileged location, in a lot of ways, that kind of drove me into sports and sports journalism, journalism overall, yes, but sports in particular, and that was my first job in journalism, was doing sports
Dave Nourse
Awesome.
Kevin Stoker
So how did you, you know, gravitate from sports to news to management, and then, I'm not sure, what did you cover up in Oregon?
Speaker 1
So I wanted to, I wanted to be in charge. I had some ideas about what it would take to be successful and spending three years at a larger newspaper, a daily. Be getting some insights there. There was some, some great work that was being done at the time there at the Great Falls Tribune. And it was my hometown paper. I grew up in Great Falls and it's it was really interesting covering sports in my hometown and sort of seeing how the larger newspapers do it. And so when I went back to Idaho to be the managing editor. I wasn't the managing editor quite at first, but I went back there with an understanding that the managing editor at the time, he was, he was leaving, and I wanted an in. And I had, I had ambitions. I wanted to, you know, being a sports editor at a small newspaper is fine, but I actually I wanted to do more. And so as I got further training in like, I was able to cover stories in the community that were education beat. I never cut. I never did, like cops and courts beat or anything like that. But education, health care, some of the elections, things like that, able to cover journalism and stories more in depth in the community than just sports. I liked it. It's not as exciting as sports, but it has maybe more impact on people, especially in terms of, like, you know, taxes and things. So when it came to being in charge of the newspaper, one, I didn't feel like that newspaper. I was the the smaller newspaper was I didn't like its design. Having been a paginator for the past four years leading up to that, I had some I wanted to design a paper kind of my own way. And so when I took over, I became its lead designer, designed most of the front pages, set forth a style guide for the rest of the newspaper, and, you know, led a redesign on that, actually, at least one really good redesign, which I still really like, and other principles, you know, were brought forth.
Kevin Stoker
Do they still use that redesign?
Speaker 1
I do not know, to be honest, no, I don't think so. I mean, this is like 15 years ago or something like that. Yeah, yeah, 16 years ago now. So, I mean, you know, it's 2008 but being able to deal with a PNL profit and loss statement, dealing with the budget, dealing with hiring, firing, gave me a lot of insight into the business of the of the organization, just being able to run the shop, and, you know, to have a hand in all these things, plus launch our fledgling social media efforts and kind of set standards for those as well. So you know, as as I came in to being a managing editor, it became less of here put out this paper three times a week, and more put out the paper three times a week and do social media and populate the website. And so things started to branch out from there. Wasn't that long after that video became introduced, and so we started doing more in that. And so as I worked in the industry, it changed due to the technological aspects of it, but I felt like the content principles needed to remain the same in a lot of ways, telling stories, telling stories in the community, finding stories that other places wouldn't find, trying to bring out stories that weren't being heard. And you know, a lot of these things I still kind of try to have in the classroom as well.
Dave Nourse
Tell us a little bit about that shift from working professionally in the field as a manager, where, certainly, mentoring young reporters is part of your job. But then you got that first adjunct position, and you realized you had a knack for teaching. Maybe tell us a little bit about what that transition was like, not necessarily the transition to teaching full time, but what was it about teaching that really satisfied you and led you to, I mean, it's not everybody that's like, you know what? I'm gonna move my family across the country to Oregon so I can go back to school at, you know, not 20 years of age.
Matt Eichner
Well, trust me, my wife had similar questions, but we had actually talked about it before and realized that there would be a time when I would be full time. We had, kind of both had the same thought, really, back when we were in Montana, that this would be something that eventually I would go into. It just was a matter of when. So, yes, I mean, working in the industry versus teaching the classroom, I could spend a lot more time mentoring on the little details that would make like turn like a fledgling writer, into somebody who's confident in producing work that could be published. And so one of my things that I say at the beginning of the beginning of a semester would be. That after spending like three months with me, hopefully you are producing work that I would be happy to print. And that has been kind of a philosophy that's driven me in a lot of ways, because I want to make sure that the time we spend together is spent putting together like, almost like a conglomeration of principles and practices to be able to produce professional quality work. And when I was at the newspaper, I could give some of that guidance. I would say, you know, write this story, and then they, they'd give me a story, they'd file it, and then I'd have to mark the heck out of it. And because some of my writers didn't always have the best training going into we would hire them, you know, not necessarily having a ton of training, because being experienced wasn't my number one quality that I was looking for. My number one quality as a managing editor was curiosity. Second would be hard work ethic, because you're not getting paid a ton, but you're expected to write a lot, so yeah, but yeah, I mean being able to spend time with students going over principles and practicing those in class. I like to do a lot of in class exercises. So what I like to do is I like to say, Okay, well, here is, like, a type of story or a principle in this type of story, like my writing classes right now we're in feature stories, so we spend a lot of time going over leads and anecdotal leads, what I call anecdotal leads, where we start out with like a story that maybe encapsulates the larger story, that condenses somebody's experience into something that's Typical. We spend a lot of time doing that. We've got exercises now where we're like, can you set the scene? Can you take me there? Can you write about something that's happening in a cogent way? And if you can do that, and I just told my students that this morning, I said, if you start with a nice story at the beginning that encapsulates somebody's life. It will make me very happy as a grader, and I will be in a much happier mood as I grade your story, which probably will result in a better grade for you. So I'm looking for an anecdote at the beginning of your story. Really, it's not necessarily required, but it is so I mean, it's part of the rubric that you have to have, like an anecdotal lead, but, you know, it doesn't always happen. So I've spent, I spend a lot of time like, let's work on this. Let's practice this. Let's take a look at a scene, and can we put this into writing? Okay, now here's an exercise. Choose from one of these three videos and write for me a description of something that was happening in that to the main character in this video.
Dave Nourse
So it seems like you've always had this element of your personality, which is been educational, right? You whether you're mentoring young reporters or now in the classroom, obviously, the chance to to mentor a lot of hopefully one day reporters, as you've developed your teaching style and your teaching philosophy, what do you think kind of what, what is Matt Eichner like as a professor or as a teacher or as a mentor? What is, what is what? What can one expect when they walk in your class already, already we found out that anecdotal lead, at least in the writing class. But I mean, let's talk a little bit more philosophy wise. Like, What's your philosophy like in the classroom?
Speaker 1
Well, my philosophy has always been that the end goal should be professional level writing. So what, whatever I can do to help facilitate that. I've always viewed myself as more of a facilitator. I believe that with enough practice and training, we can take somebody who is used to writing in this English style of we get them. All we get they've been told since their youth, five paragraphs, an introduction, three supporting points, and then a conclusion. And I say, Forget all that, and the sooner you forget all that, the better, because we don't conclude at the end. We write a summary lead at the beginning. So for news, we give away the ending first, and then you start to build the evidence after that in descending order of importance. We call that inverted pyramid. Okay, so it's, we're I'm telling a lot of there's, there's some who have experience, but in the beginning classes like, you know, the 207, classes, a lot don't. And so it's, I spend a lot of time trying to train them out of writing this style that they've done ever since high school. Like you don't need APA style citations for that. You just have to say according to this. And if you give me a link, that's great too. So I mean, it's, it's, but my philosophy is that if we have a goal in mind, we I start with. Five here's what it looks like in the professional world. We use a lot of examples, Las Vegas, the review Journal, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Pulitzer Prizes, even I say this is like the top writing. This is professional level writing. What can we do to get there? Well, let's talk about the principles of this. Now let's practice these. And after enough practice, let's start to do it. We start kind of small. Write me a lead. Okay, all right, now I'm going to give you feedback on that. Let's learn how to do quote style. Let's learn how to now we're building a story. So we start, you know, we start small, we build to a news brief, 100 to 200 words, inverted pyramid from a press release. Now we're going to add quotes and call it a short story. Now we're going to add even more quotes and details and call it a preview. And you got to go out and cover something in the community or on campus. Now we're going to write the and for this semester, we're doing election coverage. So now this this week, they're they've got, they've signed up for individual beats to cover in the election, and they have to write a preview for the election that's coming up, and they've divided it up by individual races. So somebody has, like, the local aspect of the presidential race, somebody's covering the Sam Brown, Jackie Rosen race, somebody else is covering the assemblies, somebody else is covering the mayoral race. Somebody is covering covering like Nye county races, which I lumped into one beat, so they got 10 different beats. Now, can you, can you sum up for me, what's important in this who's running? Reach out to the candidates or their PR people. What do they have to say? They're doing all that, and they're bringing it back to me, and they're like, so what do we do? Like, I can't get anybody to respond, okay, well, what should we do? And we have these discussions in classes, so by the time we get to the end of the semester, my hope is, well, they produced professional level work that anybody would be happy to print, maybe with a couple of tweaks or two, but yeah, I mean, that's what I want. So that's my philosophy.
Dave Nourse
It's a great philosophy.
Kevin Stoker
So Matt, you you had your career has kind of gone through multiple transitions, but then again, journalism has gone through multiple transitions during the part of your professional career, and now into your collegiate work. Tell me about those transitions. First, you know, you help, you know, develop the website for the standard journal, and then you moved on. And then we moved to other, you know, changing and philosophies, not just a, you know, a dump, dumping, you know, the the regular, the copy for the print edition and onto the website. But having its own, you know, your own, reporters own, you know, releasing stories as soon as they you know, reporter could get them done to also bringing in video. May, this may not be your first podcast. So all these things tell me about that, you know, kind of going through all those transitions and how it's kind of led to the way you teach journalism today.
Speaker 1
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's true the the the mediums have expanded quite a bit there, therefore we need to have at least some sort of proficiency. So when I teach, like the multimedia storytelling class, you know, it's it's like, well, let's run you through print, you know, so we're working in InDesign, but we're also producing video, producing audio. Can you take pictures, things like that? How many different ways can we tell a story? I will, I will tell you this. I believe, though, that the quality of storytelling shouldn't change over from medium to medium. I think that we're still trying to tell the story now, if, if I'm teaching the photojournalism class, well, there's been advancements in technology, from DSLR to mirrorless, and when I first started taking pictures for the newspaper in 2006 I would that was my first introduction to a to a DSLR, a one megapixel Panasonic that shot four consecutive photos and then had to process them for about a minute. And now we've got amazing mirrorless cameras with with amazing video qualities. And I say, Well, what is the story that we're trying to tell? Okay, who is out there that has a story that we can tell. We can capture that in video. We can capture that through still photography. I can write about it. I can take audio sample. Uh, sample their audio and perhaps interview them remotely, bring it all back, compile it into an audio story that we hear on NPR or something like that. But in the end, the storytelling aspect of it has to be has to have a level of integrity, because the nature of journalism we've there's been technological changes, but in the industry, what we've seen is a steady decline of trust in journalism. And when I was with the standard journal as the managing editor, we we grew our audience, and I believe we grew our audience because we reported with integrity, but we were connected to the community. And so at that time, I became a big believer in how the story is told, not just like technical proficiency. And yes, good writing helps, but the journalist needs to do a few things, and this is what I I used to tell journalists this at the end of my classes, but in this semester, I decided to say it at the beginning, because journalists have a difficult time sometimes having audiences believe them. Are there situations in which people are believed? And this is something that I learned that that forms, sort of theoretically in graduate school at Oregon, when Dr Seth Lewis had me teach certain aspects of his one of his classes, and he had some research that had writing that had been done by Alan Jacobs, who teaches, I believe, at TCU, and he wrote about there are specific times when people might change their minds. And he gave an example of the Yale Political Union. And he said there are some times when they will, quote, be broken on the floor in so the Yale Political unions debate society debate two sides of an issue, but sometimes somebody will change their mind in the middle of the debate. And I said, How is that possible? It's a combination of a couple of factors, but often what it boils down to is, yes, facts, okay, fine. Facts don't often change people's minds, however, but what can change somebody's mind is the attitude that the journalist has and that the person towards the journalist has. So there has to be some kind of relationship there. The key was that they found that when somebody changed their mind, they knew that the person that they were debating had their best interest at heart. They knew that they weren't a bad person, they weren't the enemy. They weren't out to get them, but they they had a relationship with them, and knew that, that really they weren't a bad person, that they had their best interest at heart. And I said, Well, how was that accomplished? And I believe it's two ways. One is, they're both on the journalist. One is, I believe, sort of a humility in truth telling. We're filled with drop the mic, moments, ex posts that you know are meant to be truth bombs or whatever, they rarely change minds. But I think a more transparent approach to journalism, a more Here I am, I'm willing to respond if I make mistakes, and I will make mistakes that I correct them quickly and acknowledge them. I mean, this isn't new. I mean, it's like, you know, Kovacs and Rosen steal 10 elements of journalism stuff, but rarely seen in practice. I believe, and the way to find that a journalist is an actual person, is through community involvement, especially if you're at a smaller news organization. So if you're in a community news organization, one of the things that we did was we get out in the community. I was a member of the one of the local clubs, whatever it was, Kiwanis, we met every Tuesday or Wednesday for lunch. Lot a lot of local businessmen. Well, I had a lot of conversations, lot of relationships. Okay? I knew them. They knew me. They knew what I was about. I say, you know, if you're if you're a rapport. Or an editor, get out in the community. Now, if you work for a national news organization, how can people access you? Well, you can take them behind the scenes videos. Here's who I am, you know, there's, there's several who do this, you know, because they're maybe unabashed about their support of a of a sports team or something like that, and provides a way in, you know. So it's about being accessible, understanding that you will make mistakes and it's fine. We just correct them, we acknowledge them, we move on, and then having a relationship with the audience and letting the audience know I'm not, I'm not out to get you. I'm just, I'm just, here's, here's what I saw, here's what my here's my what my source said. And I'm gonna name my source, and I'm gonna say, here's how I got the quote, and here's how I know this, and this is what they're saying. Now, if there's more out there, sure, fine, I'll do another story. I don't have a problem with it, because I don't have, like, an agenda to grind, or an ax to grind, an agenda to fulfill. I just simply want to report what's happening. And building that relationship is there's probably more ways to maybe create trust among media, but that's the one I preach among my students. I don't know. I tell them, be humble, be truthful, acknowledge your mistakes. Be you know, be accessible. Yeah.
Dave Nourse
How to build those relationships.
Matt Eichner
Yeah.
Dave Nourse
So I want to just take a minute so we've heard a lot about Matt's professional journey and his educational journey. Maybe tell us a little bit about what you're like when you're not in the classroom or you're not working. Man, I mean, yeah, all right, what do you do for fun?
Speaker 1
What do I do for I come here for fun. This is my fun podcast. Yes, podcasting. It's my it's my life. I well, so I've been, I've been married to my lovely wife, Shalina. We've been married since 2001 when we began the Eichner Odyssey, as I like to say, 2001 and Eichner Odyssey, yes, I'm old, thank you. I'm a little older, you know, for, you know, starting out second career, I suppose. But I enjoy having I enjoy spending time with my family, playing games. I've got four kids. I've got my my, my three girls. Megan is 22 and my youngest, Sierra, she's 11. No 12. Now, no 11.
Dave Nourse
Come on, Dad!
Speaker 1
She's 11. See, put me on the spot. I make all kinds of mistakes. She'll be 12 next year, and my my 16 year old daughter, who will be 17 in December, and my son Jace, who is 14, now, 15 now, yeah, so he'll be 16 next year. And we moved out to town, outside of town Pahrump. We wanted to live in a country town, mostly because my wife hates Vegas. So and I said, You know what, I don't want to live in Vegas either. I want to live out in the country. So we, we're out, we're out of town, we're we enjoy working in the yard. We're turning the desert into a green landscape, hopefully the kind of landscape where we can entertain guests sometime we're trying to, we just, we just got some grass seed in. We'll see how it goes. The nice thing about being prompt is we're on a well. We don't have the water restrictions that Vegas does, so it's kind of nice. I really enjoy watching sports. I greatly enjoyed watching the ducks beat Ohio State this weekend. That was fantastic. Sometimes I go maybe I've had to, I've had to temper that. Over the years, my wife has has helped me temper my my sports loving side of me. So I enjoy watching and playing sports quite a bit. I enjoy I enjoy eating. I love good food. I love cooking food. I love barbecue. One of the great things about moving to Texas was I learned about Texas barbecue. I am looking forward to making my first brisket out here in Nevada sometime. And there's a few of us here in the department who are Texas barbecue lovers. I know Ben burrows and Ashton. They both are. They've showed off some of their their barbecue skills. So, yeah, it's, it's something that also an attractor here. You know, having, having like minded folks. So I love being outdoors. I love that we're back in the mountains, because I've got Charleston peak looming over Pahrump. I love hiking. We take family hiking at least once a month up in the Spring Mountains, if we can.
Dave Nourse
You have to go through the pass. The Potosi Pass.
Matt Eichner
Yeah, I gotta go through the pass there. I haven't had a January yet. I understand it can get a little snowy and icy. It's fine. We I got the four wheel drive.
Dave Nourse
Listen, you. You grew up in Montana. I think you'll be fine. Yeah, you'll be fine.
Matt Eichner
Oh, you know all the drivers out there, if there's any of you listening, all you have to do is just slow down. Okay? If you just slow down, it'll be fine.
Kevin Stoker
Seriously, so So Matt, if there was a question we should have asked you that we haven't asked you, what would it be?
Matt Eichner
You know, professionally, speaking about the job, it's um, it's a little more difficult than I thought it would be. Maybe, um, being a professor isn't like super easy. There's a lot that goes into it, and I had a real crash course in Texas, and I feel like I'm better at it now, which is nice, better for you, Kevin, since you're my boss, and you can benefit from all the I've learned from some of the mistakes that I've made in the past. And so I think that's true for all of us. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a journey, you know, for me, it's, it's always been a journey. This is a, this is a great adventure, you know, learning things, learning new things, implementing new things. There's always something new to learn. There's, you know, there's always something more I could do. And so I felt already very connected to the area. I've already felt very connected to UNLV, and I am super excited to be here. I mean, it's my second semester. We I joined up full time in January, and I have just loved it here. I mean, the facilities are fantastic. But more than that. It's, it's everybody in the department. You know, one of the things that Kevin you talked about when I was being hired was sort of bridging the gap between upstairs and downstairs. Downstairs is a lot of technical skills, and upstairs is a lot of theory. And I feel like I'm a nice blend of both and and, you know, one of the things that I really appreciate about being with Dr Ben Burrows is is his, he's given me a few opportunities to contribute to research. Again, that was something that I felt like I didn't do very well at when I was in Texas. And starting to, starting to do more writing, starting to do a little bit more research, get off the ground with that has been exciting to me. And, you know, the the one thing that's negative is a three hour commute. You know, three hours are spent in the car, and I'm just like, Man, I need to be more productive, just like, so that's, I mean, that's the only thing that that I haven't, you know, and that's the only negative is that three hour commute. Other than that, I've just absolutely loved it here, the opportunities the students have here at UNLV, the different types of storytelling, especially in sports, but I think an underrated aspect, or all the other news stories that are out, that are out there, and we spend a lot of time, you know, sports, sports telling, sports storytelling. There's, there's great avenues for that here, especially in a lot of video this big emphasis here in this department, there's, there's a lot of stories out there that aren't being told, and the students have a unique opportunity to tell those stories. And there, there are so many opportunities here in Las Vegas, I never even thought were possible for students, and hopefully I can help facilitate some of that experience.
Kevin Stoker
Well, thank you, Matt. We've really enjoyed talking to you. It's been terrific. And that was a great answer. That was a great answer to a question. We really didn't ask a question.
Dave Nourse
Matt, what a pleasure.
Matt Eichner
Yeah.
Dave Nourse
It was a pleasure chatting. And I'll just say it's great having you on the faculty.
Kevin Stoker
I agree.
Matt Eichner
Oh well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed you both. I really like this talk, actually, this this conversation. So thanks.