Magazine Beach Project: A Glimpse into Client Work

I see the Magazine Beach project as a learning experience designed to prepare us for client work in New Orleans. As part of a student group called Four Consulting, I've worked with student groups and administrative groups at MIT to help them solve some of their problems, most of which amounted to publicity campaigns or exec board structures. The scope of these projects spread mostly around campus, sometimes stretching into the outer community but not often.

In that sense, the Magazine Beach was kind of a challenge for me. Magazine Beach has a long history and involves many players in the Cambridgeport, Greater Boston, and State communities. Many people have invested their time and money to see this project moved forward.

My biggest challenge so far has been to accept the larger scope of this project and rather than shrink away at the intimidating size of it, come up to meet it. The bar has been set high, but I think our class as a team can meet it and raise if even higher.

In short, we have to step it up!

My goal for this project, beyond pleasing the client and learning from our individual groups, is to feel more confident in my abilities and perspectives. I think it's often easy to feel small at MIT, but working with outside groups reminds me of how much potential we all have! We can truly accomplish a lot if we work together and apply ourselves, and I'm hoping to bring that attitude and confidence to New Orleans in April. 

NOLA as seen through "Treme"

It's no secret that watching television is my favorite thing to do in my free time. I've been known to wax poetic about my favorite program with a friend in lieu of doing a p-set now and again... so, imagine my joy at watching part of the HBO series Treme in class!

As I've mentioned before, most of my prior knowledge of New Orleans came from the stereotypes of the city: mardi gras, gumbo, jazz music. What else I knew of the city came through video footage of Hurricane Katrina. Because of this, I saw the city as both one with a rich history and cultural traditions, as well as one with an inefficient political system and precarious geographical location. My perception of the city has been augmented and made more realistic through the course of the class so far, especially since I now know more of the city's history.

Before starting Treme, I had one question in mind: is this show a realistic view of the Treme neighborhood and how was it perceived by New Orleanians? In my limited research so far, I found that the city's residents had generally positive responses to the show. The Times-Picayune even has a weekly column called "Treme Explained," decoding all the NOLA-specific references to non-locals. From what I saw in the pilot episode, Treme could prove a great introduction to the city, beyond what most people have seen on CNN.

One thing I realized when watching the rest of the pilot is that I often missed a lot of the conversation unless I had the closed captioning on. This acts as a reminder of how removed I am from life in Treme or New Orleans in general. I needed captions to understand what people were saying-- how will I do in NOLA once we're actually there in person?