Stories
Finding her voice in the field
CMU Communications and Media student Melanie Giesbrecht has spent her summer connecting with communities across southern Manitoba through a Work-Integrated Learning placement with Golden West Broadcasting.
Melanie Giesbrecht is, luckily, a people person.
Through her Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) placement at Golden West Broadcasting as the summer events host, her job is to interview, question, and talk with attendees and report live from events–whether they be town fairs, rodeos, or music festivals–all around Steinbach and the surrounding area southern Manitoba.
All throughout the events, she creates videos for social media, drafts and publishes write up, and interviews leading figures behind the scenes of the local entertainments.
Admittedly, it's skills she's grown into.
She says the extroversion required for the job was "not something I would have considered myself capable of before this job. So just finding myself comfortable in those spaces is super rewarding."
In turn, she says she's been given larger responsibilities. Giesbrecht was tapped to act as journalist and reporter for the publication for the recently launched NivervilleOnline, a website dedicated to reporting the local news of Niverville and the greater area. This was Giesbrecht's largest role yet; stepping into a job she never expected when she began her WIL placement.
Having just wrapped up her third year of a Communications and Media degree at CMU, she says the skills she has learned in the classroom, are skills she "is thinking about and using every day."
"I am actively recalling myself sitting in that classroom and what I was hearing as I'm going about what I'm doing in my work," she says.
"It's something that my journalism professor, Ashley Prest, did a good job preparing me for. [She told me], 'you wake up in the morning, and you'll be asked to be an expert in this subject area for that morning. You will just have to go with it, you're going to have to find the right questions to ask and the right people to talk to'."
To Giesbrecht, the 'hard' or technical skills of media studies are only useful once combined with the 'soft' skills like interpersonal communication techniques or learning how to express herself through writing. She says it's not something she realized until she was out in the workforce.
Giesbrecht never thought, at only 20-years-old, she would already be in this position of interviewing town mayors and founders of organizations that support survivors of human trafficking.
As someone who never quite knew what they wanted out of their education, she says the CMU Communications and Media degree gave her more room to choose a path as they were taking courses, instead of sticking to a ridged program structure.
"I feel like I'm one of those students whose kind of obsessed with how my courses carry over into my everyday life. I get really passionate about interdisciplinary studies, and I think that there's so many courses that have prepared me for what I do.
"I wanted to do something that was more people focused and that focused on relationships and how I'm interacting with people and communication more as an art than as like a science," she says.
Giesbrecht says the best day at her job so far has been competing in the Steinbach Smitty's restaurant wing eating competition. A great opportunity to not only eat food and gather content for her role as the summer events host, but also to a way to engage further with the people and places she is writing about.
"I found how you as an individual and everything that makes up your personality and your belief systems and your values influences what you're able to put out into these spaces, and in what ways you can positively impact people around you."
"I'm always thinking, how does this impact the community?... How can I share this information in a way that I reflect the reflects positively on the community and improves their lives instead of just adding one more story that they're going to briefly glance at?"
As Giesbrecht returns to CMU for her fourth year, beyond the lessons of her WIL placement, she will be bringing back a second-place ribbon in the wing eating competition.
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