A unique study abroad – in Iraq

"I'm definitely not nearly as scared as I thought I was going to be," says Jessica Hoffman, a senior at UAF who is also a recreational sky diver. Earlier that morning, Ms. Hoffman had donned a padded suit and allowed a military dog to attack her on camera as a demonstration for a video story.

Whose idea? The university's president.

The idea for the field trip to Iraq came about after a couple of UAF alumni serving in the US Army in Iraq sent in regular columns to the school newspaper for a year about life as deployed soldiers. Seeing the success of the column, university president Mark Hamilton, a former US Army general, suggested the journalism department try embedding a group of students.

UAF already had a relationship with the Stryker brigade, which is stationed at Fairbanks's Fort Wainwright when it wasn't in Iraq, so they had the necessary contacts to arrange the embed. Additionally, on account of the brigade being an Alaska-based unit, local news outlets said they were interested in whatever the students produced.

O'Donoghue also saw the trip as an opportunity for students to learn to collect information and produce news stories while working in adverse circumstances.

"For school, we would do video stories, but we'd have at least a week to work them," says Ms. Hoffman. In Iraq, she went from producing one story a week to one a day. "We're getting an idea of what it's going to feel like when we're actually working," she says.

The students produced print, broadcast, and radio pieces and distributed their work free of charge via their own makeshift newswire. O'Donoghue says the vast majority of their pieces have been picked up by local news stations in Alaska. Though the students are not paid for published work, they will receive an internship credit. (To read their work, go to http://shorttimers.blogspot.com/ and look for "Publication links" on the right.)

Bonus for military: PR in Alaska

For Hyde, the group's ability to reach Alaskan media outlets was a particular coup. As in newsrooms across the nation, budgets are increasingly tight for Alaska news agencies, so Hyde often has difficulty attracting local media outlets to embed with his unit. The UAF group received $35,000 from the school's private fund to cover travel expenses, insurance, equipment, and other incidental costs.

Based on the success of the UAF trip, at least one other university has contacted US forces in Iraq about conducting a similar embed project. As for Afghanistan, however, Hyde and O'Donoghue say that they doubt anyone would try sending students there given the current level of violence.

For their part, the UAF students all say they hope the university will continue the program or something like it in the future. Tom Hewitt, a UAF senior, acknowledges that, especially with the media industry's current struggles, this trip represents an unparalleled opportunity.

"What I'll probably take away from this more than anything else ... is if you see an opportunity like this one that seems almost unbelievable at first, just to go for it," says Mr. Hewitt, who jokes that his term as editor of the school paper may be his only chance to hold such a position given journalism's woes. "The whole thing has proved so valuable that I can't imagine not doing it now, even though initially it didn't seem like that realistic of an option."

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