senior program summer site : conversations : second session



	kyle from pennsylvania (8/2) Kyle's a residential student at Explo for the first time and he's going into the 10th grade. He loves math, so he enjoys his math class, but he's been surprised at his interest in his advertising class and is seriously considering pursuing that in the future. What's your first course? My first course is the advertising and marketing class. It is really like an incredibly amazing class. We sit down and watch advertisements, we dissect them, we find out what the motives behind them are, and we see some really amazing ones, so it's very cool. We watched one today, an advertisement for a chainsaw company, and it started off like this creepy horror movie. It looked like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in a way -- basically, where there's a guy chasing a girl into a building and he goes to kill her and the chainsaw does not work. So we assume that it's trying to show that this company's chainsaws do work, as opposed to the competition [laughs]. We discussed what their motives are, who they're advertising to. We learned that companies sometimes use scare tactics to get people to buy their product, or sometimes it's done for humor. There was a mix in this. Then today we also looked at how they put products in movies very subtly. We watched part of a movie and wrote down all the product names that we saw advertised, you know, very quietly without being overt. The movie was Drillbit Taylor. We saw that they use Dell laptops in there and they talk about the iPod and they had an Apple t-shirt, so you see that people really do advertise everywhere. You may not always see it but it's there, so that was really interesting. And you guys are working on your own advertisements, right? Yeah, we had a really fun day yesterday. The assignment was originally to pick a product to advertise. Ours was a teleportation device. Our plan was to show how much walking people do. We did this scene where people are trying to rush to classes and rush to check-ins, and we show that it'd be a lot less stressful if we used teleportation to zap ourselves there instantly. But today the instructor switched the rules on us. He told us a story of when he participated in a competition, and then he applied the same rules to our situation. Basically he didn't give us any of the materials we asked for. He said we had five minutes to run to our dorm and get anything we needed for the advertisement, and then he confined us to the classroom and the immediate hallway. So we filmed these commercials in less than an hour and I think they came out pretty well. We get to see everyone's on Monday and they may make them to Explopalooza. How did you come up with a teleportation device? It had to be a unique product. It couldn't be a revision of an already existing thing -- like some kind of super car. And what's your second course? My second course is the professional mathematics course. We're working a lot on game theory. We looked at probability and using math to locate where criminals go. We watched part of an episode of the TV show Numbers. We watched to see what formulas can be used to calculate criminal patterns. So we're going to use some formula to calculate where a person may live or whatever and use it to solve a situation we'll get. We're getting the background now and then we'll get the assignment soon. We also learned how to count cards -- and we tried to use that technique at Casino Night [laughs]. It actually surprisingly gave you an added piece of knowledge to use to decide whether it would be statistically useful to hit or not [in blackjack]. That was fun. Is there a future in any of this for you? I really love math. I think it's extremely fun, so that's one of the reasons I picked the math course. But going back to my advertising course, I think I'm really going to look into that more because I've really enjoyed it. I may see what's available in that career path. What mini-course did you just finish? Cartoon and satire. I thought it was a great course, very fun. It was one of those things where you look at something in a different way, and I don't think I've ever looked at cartoons this way. Basically, we discussed all these different ways of interpreting what cartoons are targeting their humor at: sometimes they'll target the broadcasting company, sometimes they'll make fun of a situation currently happening. It kind of fits into the advertising class because it's a different way of looking at things. We'll look at an episode of like Family Guy or South Park and discuss the different satirical properties and so on. It's really the same type of thinking because it's looking at the underlying things. You have to look at things more carefully. Oh, and I just remembered something else funny we looked at in my advertising class: the instructor told us how many advertisements you bump into every day and I think it was around 7000, and you don't even notice them. I thought it was amazing. So if you had to describe Explo as an object, what would it be? It's funny, I remember reading that someone described it as an airplane, and I really keep having that float through my brain. It's slow starting out a little bit and then it takes off and you meet new people and hang out in groups and do things at night and it's very fun. It's just a great time. It's slow starting out because you meet new people and get used to how things work and learn the layout of town and everything, but then it really becomes second nature. You just get used to it, and you learn when the check-ins are and all that, and you hang out with your friends and it's really great. If you were an animal, what would you be? Maybe like a dog. This is based off my dog: my dog is very calm and gentle and loyal and I think those types of things fit me. more conversations > first session \| second session