Communication, English and Foreign Languages
By Brittney Payette
Managing Editor
At 2 p.m. on Sept. 8 in Nance Boyer room 2005, the Communication, English, and Foreign Languages (CEFL) department hosted a meet and greet event for majors and minors of that department.
Students could walk in and enjoy food and drinks, register to win a door prize, and interact with other students and professors in the CEFL department.
The new CEFL department chair, Dr. Von Underwood, was present at the event and said he felt happy about becoming the new department chair, even though it can sometimes be challenging.
“I love these people,” Underwood said. “I like working with the students. It’s a large department, with a lot of different things going on.”
Underwood said that he is excited for what is to come this year.
“In the spring, we are going to run a seminar that has some federal aviation association teachers,” He said. “It is going to be a course in drone operation. So, operating drone cameras.”
Freshman Journalism and Media Production major Lindsey Reak was one of the meet-and-greet attendees.
Underwood said that he wants to help grow and strengthen the programs in the department.
“One aspect of building the programs is just keeping up with these challenges,” Underwood said.
Freshman Journalism and Media Production major Lindsey Reak attended the meet-and-greet.
“I thought this would be a good opportunity to meet people with the same interests as me,” Reak said. “I really like writing a lot. I hope I can make a career out of it.”
Reak said that she enjoys writing fiction.
“I kind of want to try to start writing, like, short stories,” Reak said. “I’ve been reading a lot of historical fiction lately because I just find it fascinating to learn about the past and different cultures.”
Additionally, the Assistant Professor and Director of Composition, Dr. Carie Schneider, was at the meet and greet. She said that Cameron’s composition program recently underwent some transformations to ensure Cameron meets the course equivalency project requirements, so general education credits are transferable across Oklahoma.
“We wanted to ensure that the new curriculum was in line with that transfer standards,” Schneider said. “We also wanted to update it to make sure we were focused on real-world genres of writing.”
Schneider said that last year, the department created a new, free digital in-house textbook.
“Now we have a textbook that’s fully online,” Schneider said. “It’s zero dollars. It’s designed exactly for what our students need to learn in our classes.”
The contest winners were published in the new in-house textbook as the best examples of class assignments.
“Students won money, and they got published,” Schneider said. “We are going to do another round of that essay contest this spring. There’s a couple essays we didn’t get examples for, like rhetorical analysis.”
The free online textbook can be found at https://open.ocolearnok.org/cuwrite/.
The CEFL department will be looking for any essay written in a Composition one or two class in 2022 at Cameron.
Attendees at the event were able to sign up and perform during the open mic part of the meet-and-greet.
One of the performers was freshman Communication major Samantha Deuel.
“I was super anxious,” Deuel said. “But I figured poetry is an easier way to talk to people than small talk.”
Deuel said she enjoyed the meet-and-greet.
“I really liked the idea of like getting everyone from one major together and socializing,” She said. “Especially if performance is encouraged. That’s really cool to me.”
For more information about the CEFL department, contact Underwood at vonu@cameron.edu.
