Andrew Rosenthal December 2021 Staff Reflections

I am honored to be able to write the final media brief for The Energy Rights Project. If I may be excused for a little self indulgence, this reflection will reflect upon my experience with Media Briefs as a whole and my time writing them. I feel like we never truly pinned down an audience for them, but the archive we created has helped elevate all of us to a status more intune with the world around us. My extensive collection documenting Comcast’s Internet Essentials Program chronologically will serve me in the future when I delve into internet vulnerability for the pandemic. I am sure that the focus of my teammates for these media briefs will aid them similarly. During the meetings where we discussed the point of media briefs, the notion that they were for us was always brought up and this seems to be the “correct” answer. The fact that many of us started our jobs as undergraduate students allowed the media briefs to serve as an exercise to find specialties that we may want to focus on later. I think these reflections serve a similar purpose, to allow us to go back and see what our thought process was. This entire project has been experimental in nature and allowed us a sense of freedom that you often don’t see in research assistantships. I am eternally grateful for the opportunity I was given and will forever appreciate how it has shaped me going forward.