School of Communications
Communications student Sara Jane Aubrey shares how an experiential learning opportunity has enhanced her time at BYU
In spring 2019, I had the opportunity to travel to China with the BYU Spectacular as a member of the media team. BYU Communications professor Adam Durfee, another student and I were largely responsible for creating Chinese social media channels as well as creating content — specifically videos — to be posted. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are not allowed in China, so they use other channels like WeChat, Weibo and YouKu. While creating these accounts on these platforms, we had the goal to help the Chinese social media community have an increased knowledge of what BYU is like. We created a variety of videos before we left for China that showed different parts of campus, discussed the variety of majors available at BYU and had testimonials from current BYU students from China. While in the country, we documented BYU students practicing, performing and experiencing the culture in China.
I had been dreaming of going to China ever since I was called to serve a mission in Manchester England, speaking the Mandarin Chinese language. While China was incredible and I could talk for hours about the spiritual, powerful and inspiring experiences I had, there were unplanned experiences that were exceptionally enriching. These challenging, stressful and amazing experiences actually started before I even left for China, as my visa didn’t come until two days before!READ MORE