Hello fellow IMC students. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday! My apologies for being gone so long from the blog, but I’ve been traveling all over the country for the past 8 days. It’s the first time since I started the program that I’ve been away from home for so long, so it was a good test of how portable the program can be, if you’re prepared.

On Friday June 29 I flew from Pittsburgh to Atlanta and then onto Augusta, where my good friend from high school picked me up to attend the wedding of another high school friend in Aiken, South Carolina. I took along my laptop computer and my textbook for the 615 Creative Strategy class, and boy was I glad I carried them on! Bad weather in Atlanta forced us to sit for 2 hours on the tarmac in Pittsburgh. While other passengers spent the time complaining about the delay, I read the next week’s chapter in the textbook, and started to work on the scripts for the radio and TV ads that will be due in class later this week. So I actually ended my trip to Aiken (at 2:30 in the morning!) ahead of the game as far as my school work was concerned. The Hampton Inn where we were staying had high speed internet access, so I was able to spend part of Saturday morning reading the discussion board postings that had been posted on Friday night. I returned to Pittsburgh on Sunday morning, where I was able to put the final touches on the week’s main assignment in plenty of time to turn it in on Monday.

JT in Roseville, IL, population 1100, none of whom have high speed internet access!

The living was not so easy when it came to my second trip of the week: a 10 hour drive on the 4th of July to Roseville, Illinois, a tiny town in the middle of farm country, about 40 minutes from the Iowa line. We were there to visit my mother in law, who lives with my sister in law and her husband on a farm surrounded by cornfields. Once again the laptop and textbook came in handy for the drive out and back: I was able to get a lot of work done for the coming week. The bad part is that there is no high speed internet access to be had anywhere in the Roseville area, and no places where you can go wireless, like a Starbucks. My brother in law’s computer uses dial-up access, so that’s what I used to read and post to the discussion board. It took me twice as long to read and post as it normally would, but I got the work done!

What did I learn from my travels as it applies to the program?

1. Own a laptop. Once again it allowed me to get a lot of work done during time that otherwise would have been wasted.

2. Plan ahead. I posted early and got a lot of the week’s work done BEFORE I headed out, and made sure I would have internet access in both locations where I was staying. While I ended up ahead of the game by the end of my odyssey, there was no way to know for sure that I wouldn’t get stuck somewhere and unable to post or submit work, which everyone knows, is no excuse for late work in this program!

3. High-speed internet access is a “must.” If any of you are using dial-up access to complete this program, God bless you! I was tearing out my hair using dial-up for just a few days. I can’t imagine what it would be like if that was my permanent mode of access!

The corn may be as high as an elephant’s eye in Roseville, but the ability to access high speed internet isn’t.