Blog Post #4: The Week of 04/08/2024

Greetings from Pennsylvania! Or, more precisely, a random highway on the return from Pennsylvania at 10pm! This week I had a slight detour to visit Penn State University Park in State College, Pennsylvania. This will be my last stop on my college acceptance journey as I finally sit down and decide where I’m going to go!

Overall, I really enjoyed my visit! The weather was not in our favor with the whole day being rather gloomy and then raining pretty bad near the end, but we were still able to get through everything that we wanted to do and see, including a detailed visit to the Bellisario School of Communications. I was initially worried that the size of the school would intimidate me, seeing as University Park has over 43,000 undergraduate students on campus, but the College of Communications is actually rather small, coming in at 2,700 students, so I felt far more comfortable with it. Not to mention the amount of resources they have boggles my mind coming from a small school like BIM. I really couldn’t find much negative to the university as a whole. My only real issue is that I don’t necessarily love the dorming options, but that’s very dealable overall so…it’s currently my top option! 

Since I took the day to go to Penn State, I worked from the car for my internship, which actually worked out remarkably well. Thank you T-Mobile for giving me decent hotspot data as I continued to research insurers for Innocuous at 4am, which was when we left for PA. I continue to edit pitch decks alongside the usual work of making social media posts and researching, which consumes most of my time. Otherwise, life continues to inch forward on that front. 

In terms of my research, everything is progressing rather smoothly as well, luckily! I finalized my sources this week so now comes the tedious task of actually reading through all of them and taking notes for my final paper. I’ve started collecting daily data on some of the Washington Post Shorts’ most recent uploads, which is revealing some trends with their separate TikTok and YouTube Accounts. Namely, in a shocking turn of events, their YouTube account actually gets much more interaction than their TikTok Account, which I wasn’t expecting. I believe this to be due to the more rapid-paced nature of the TikTok Algorithm, compared to YouTube which has a slower turnover of videos. Tiktok prefers short, fast content with multiple uploads daily while YouTube is more satisfied with longer videos uploaded less frequently. The Washington Post Shorts land pretty much in the middle, as most of their videos are about 20-30 seconds long, but more research will be needed for that, so stay turned to see what I uncover! 

So, in conclusion, for the most part, my paper is coming together! I have already started outlining the rough sections to start to organize all the information I’m receiving into something coherent that I can actually use for something. As per usual, I’ll continue to update week by week, so keep on checking back in for more!