Happy Accidents

Sara Peralta
Texas State Mass Communication grad student in Strategic Media. Agnes Scott College alumna in International Relations. Work at AGE. Native Austinite. Lover of tacos. Aspiring world traveler. Locavore wannabe. Speaker of spanglish. Voted “Best Auntie” by my niece (age 7) and nephew (age 5) six years running.






My journey to Texas State’s graduate program in mass communications has been a long one (but not too long).

I am a first year graduate student in the Mass Communications program at Texas State, focusing on Strategic Media. I am honored to work in non-profit communications for a senior services agency called AGE.

My professional experience is with non-profit organizations, beginning with fundraising for my university while still an undergraduate, to teaching at-risk youth in a summer camp setting, to case management with a refugee services agency. My reasons for working committing myself to being overworked and under-appreciated the non-profit sector are a long and personal story that I have told here (my website). I began working in non-profit communications by accident, when I was interning with an agency that switched me from case management intern to development intern (fundraising). That happy accident of being switched from one role to another within the non-profit environment changed the whole course of my career and led me to find my true calling: communications.

Since then, I have continued to build my skills on the job and advance my career. I have sent press releases, worked fundraising campaigns, trained volunteers, organized fundraising events, spoken to donors, and run social media sites with success considering I do not have formal training. But that was not really good enough for me, truthfully. I know I can help more people if my skills were stronger. I know I could impact and change the community even more with better communication skills.






Somewhere in the midst of of building a career, I've managed to do some traveling (Photo 1: me at the Tui


leries in Paris), and eventually moved back to Texas to be closer to my family, namely, my adorable nephew and niece (Photo 2: They are officially too cool to be photographed.)

So, here I am, in graduate school. I have found all my classes at Texas State to be absolutely practical for a career in communications, in fact, I have yet to have a class that I didn’t take something from and bring it back to the office with me the next day (Photo 3: Me at work, representing my organization, raising awareness, communicating, all in a day's work!).










About The History of the Internet film (original post here)






Seeing this film a second time around, its hard not to draw parallels between the current state of the Internet and the space shuttle. Both projects were started under the Department of Defense's ARPA division, as part of the technology race with the Soviets during the old war.






However, while both initiatives started together, the paths diverged when NASA became its own agency, and the technology that would create the internet stayed under ARPA. NASA, flush with funding and resources, found success relatively quickly compared to its less glamorous brother in ARPA. In 1969 both had successfully achieved major milestones: one put a man on the moon, the other networked computers from across the nation.






Flash forward a few decade, and now NASA will no longer fly the shuttle but catch rides with the Russians and hope for a private sector solution. Meanwhile the internet has flourished, with leading innovators developing and evolving the technology everyday. Its hard not to wonder, what would have happened if a private solution for space travel had been opened up years ago? Maybe we'd be on Mars already.