“We just wanted to create a space where we could bring high school students, college students and industry professionals together in a room to kind of just engage,” digital media instructor at The Murrell Dobbins Career and Technical Education High School (Dobbins) Anis Taylor said. Taylor, along with digital music instructor Indy Shome and Klein College of Media and Communications Assistant Director of External Affairs Kalie Wertz planned the Creating the Future Student Media Symposium to create such a space.

In addition to the invaluable connections made at the symposium, the event also won an award through the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development (PHENND). Creating the Future won runner up for the Phillip B. Lindy Award for Excellence in K-16 Partnerships and received a grant of $500 to use in the program’s future.

Wertz, Taylor and Shome started talking in November 2020 about a possible way to bring Temple University and Dobbins together. After deciding that conferences were often boring for students, they decided to “flip the conference idea on its head” by making the students the ones giving presentations and industry professionals the ones in the audience, according to Wertz.

In total, 63 people attended the online symposium on April 9, 2021, including Christian Angelini, a rising sophomore and media studies and production major at Klein. Angelini presented some of his work within sports media, facilitated a panel discussion and gave advice and inspiration to the Dobbins students and industry professionals in attendance. “Everyone had a really good discussion; everyone brought a lot of information to the table,” he said.

Shome described the event as “speaking horizontally, and not just in our silos.” The idea behind the symposium’s structure was to rebalance the power dynamics in conversations across industries, ages and backgrounds. Taylor emphasized the “bottom up” learning that resulted from flipping the conference on its head, where the students became the experts and taught the professionals. 

“All of the presentations were awesome. I was floored by pretty much all of them,” Shome said. One group of his students went beyond media production in their presentation. A group of 10th grade girls partnered with Inner Strength Education, which focuses on mental and emotional health through music. As a part of their music project, not only did they learn different types of music technology and how to produce at home, but they also wrote a business pitch around the project. Their project turned into a podcast, and now the girls have a working relationship with a billboard charting rapper.

Wertz, Taylor and Shome all hope to continue their partnership and make the symposium an annual event every spring. Taylor hopes that they can bring in more schools and sponsors,  allowing the symposium to last for three or four days instead of three or four hours. “I think that we laid a lot of the groundwork this year and those that came saw how effective it was, so it’s just about continuing and building on that,” Wertz said.