 The 2022 annual Southeastern Kentucky Chamber Awards night is September 27th for tickets call 606-432-5504. You can also watch live on the free Mountain Top TV app. On Thursday, September 1st, U-Pike Film and Media Director Andrew Reed hosted a mixer for current film students and those interested in joining the program. The mixer featured select student speakers as well as guest speakers and was hosted in the new FMA Computer Lab in the Armington Science Center. Today we're hosting a mixer event where we're going to have not only our new freshman or people that are just kind of interested in FMA and haven't really taken any courses yet, but we're also going to have some long-standing people that have either graduated from the FMA program or are seniors to come in and talk a little bit about kind of the experiences they've had, what they have enjoyed the most about the program and opportunities it's connected them to. Really the main goal with the mixer today is to help introduce the new students or those that are wanting to know more about the program to the opportunities that they can have if they consider taking one of our classes or pursue one of our certificate or minor or major programs. Reed also comments on the importance of networking and drawing in new students to pick up a film major. This allows any student who wishes to pursue a film major to speak directly to him now that he is located in a more publicly available space. For Reed, he views film and media arts as a family. Now that we're up here, we can better network with students that are taking related courses, connect them to the opportunities that they have through us. Even my office itself catches a lot of eyeballs. Students walking by here, comments all the time, oh, I want to take whatever that guy teaches, right? That's just me thinking about marketing, right? We're trying to show how much fun a career in multimedia production can be, all the opportunities available to students and we truly, I think, are a family. I think every good program at a college, you maintain those connections. You still talk with those people. You talk to the alums. You try to help students find meaningful employment. And so we really, truly do have a film and media arts family now that the program is 10 years old. Reporting from Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Colum.