"Always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think."

The words that adorned my graduation mortarboard did not come from a celebrity, football legend or prominent historical figure. 

Indeed, amid a sea of scarlet and gray Block O's and intricate buckeye-leaf designs, my graduation hat featured a message from an animated boy speaking to his "silly old bear."

This quote has been a constant presence through many stages of my life. It has appeared in picture frames, in collages and as a computer background on my first-ever laptop.

Now, it has appeared once again.

As I look to the future of post-graduation life, these words continue to be a fitting reminder of the importance of confidence and belief in oneself.

After preschool, I would come home and watch Pooh's Grand Adventure​ on VHS. I would laugh as the movie's cast of adorable animals set off through the Hundred Acre Wood in search of their friend Christopher Robin. My mom would prepare dinner while I watched the well-meaning Owl misread the word "school" as "skull." As a child who loved to read, I was puzzled as to why going to school was such a scary concept. It didn't occur to me that one day, I, too, would have to hug my stuffed animals goodbye, hop onto a yellow bus and trade playdates and make-believe for pencils and mathematics.

Last Friday, I was honored to receive two awards from the Ohio State University School of Communication — the Robert F. Wolfe Journalism Honor Medal and the Kappa Tau Alpha Top Scholar Award. As a graduating senior, this experience was one of the last I will have as an undergraduate in the journalism program at Ohio State. I could not think of a better way to end an inspiring four years surrounded by outstanding faculty, coworkers and peers.

My involvement with The Lantern, Ohio State's student newspaper, started with a single article about the creation of a massive, hand-painted soccer banner, published in the fall of 2013. Seeing my byline on The Lantern's website was a dream come true and a feat I did not think I could pull off within my freshman year, let alone my first month on campus. The experience of seeing my story — the quotes I painstakingly transcribed, the words I specifically chose to describe the triumphant moment when the tifo was hoisted above the crowd — elicited a smile as I emailed the link to my family and friends.

Seven semesters and almost 100 stories later, I still get excited at the thought of picking up a copy of any publication that contains one of my articles. Since my first semester at Ohio State, I have had many experiences as a student journalist, all of which have taught me skills I might not have learned by just sitting in the classroom taking notes. From covering breaking news events well into the early hours of the morning to watching as thousands of my cap-and-gown-clad peers walk through the 'Shoe, I am proud to identify myself as a journalist, a title that inspires me to document the stories that are most important to those who read the words I write.

Writing and working for publications such as The Lantern, The Arizona Republic, CityScene Magazine and BroadwayWorld.com Columbus has shaped my undergraduate experience in ways that I could not have predicted, and for that I am forever grateful.

As I look ahead to my future as a soon-to-be graduate of Ohio State, I am equally nervous and excited for what is to come. But I also know that I have an amazing network of support that will accompany me every step of the way. I would not be where I am today without the help of friends, family and those who have, over the years, become as close as family. 

I have been blessed to have had unforgettable experiences over the past four years. From spending a summer in Arizona writing for The Republic and USA TODAY to representing OSU on a journalism trip to Japan, I am forever grateful to everyone who has believed in me and my talents. 

As I look to the next steps in my life, I’m excited to put the skills I have learned at this university to the test. 

By Amanda Etchison

Amid the frenetic fishmongers bustling to and fro through wet alleyways overflowing with discarded bits of seafood in Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji Fish Market, an interesting sight stood out from the vibrant scene of activity:  groups of wide-eyed, camera-toting tourists crowded around the perimeter of the market.
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Although hailing from a diverse range of countries, the foreigners were generally easy to recognize in the crowd. Their jeans and t-shirts stood out in stark contrast to the bloodstained aprons of the Tsukiji Market employees, while GoPros and shopping bags served as further visual identification.

As a member of one of the many touring groups meandering through the market, I witnessed mixed reactions to our presence. It ranged from quizzical glances and curious questions to angry shoves and impatient requests to move out of the way.

Our visit to Tsukiji was our first official stop as tourists in Tokyo, and provided valuable insight into how this city is experienced.

The market is a popular destination for both locals and foreigners, and one of many that caters to the millions of tourists who flock to the island nation every month.

According to a May 18 article in The Japan Times, April 2016 saw 2.08 million foreign visitors come into the country, a single-month record.
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Throughout the many districts in Tokyo we visited on our first full day in Japan’s capital city, it became obvious that tourism is generally accepted, and, in some cases, even embraced.
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​From the sparkling interior of the Tokyo Tower to the picturesque grounds of the Imperial Palace, every storefront and street was photo-ready. Most signs, thankfully, were printed in both Japanese and English, and familiar brand names straight from the malls at home illuminated the halls of the Skytree shopping complex in Sumida.
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Although there is some comfort in being able to emerge from any given subway station and be immediately confronted with the green and white lettering of a Starbucks, it does make one wonder where the culture of universal marketing and tourist-friendly Japan ends and the authentic Tokyo begins.
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Like any large metropolitan hub, Tokyo is a city of myriad stories. And it is through shared, genuine moments between locals and tourists — a conversation with a fish market employee or a friendly smile exchanged between fellow subway passengers that transcends language barriers — that one experiences the true culture that resides and thrives in a location.
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​The most memorable experiences from this trip so far have been those we’ve encountered while wandering through the streets, taking in the local life that exists away from the perfectly manicured gardens of giant tourist attractions.

​One needs only to be open to striking up a conversation on the subway or simply observing the small moments that are glimpsed throughout the day to get a sense of the human story that lies beneath the shiny newness of Tokyo’s streets.
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While, at times, being a tourist in city like Tokyo can be equal parts overwhelming, fascinating or scary, it is not that different from other cities around the globe. When you take the time to step back and pay attention to the stories unfolding around you, you’ll find that the heart and soul of Tokyo is actually not that foreign at all.

By Amanda Etchison and Eric Weitz

​In his 12 years of paychecks at Ohio State, Pranav Jani, an associate professor in the Department of English, said he still remembers one specific year.

“One of my raises recently was tiny; it came out to about $30 a month,” he said. “That’s roughly seven more Starbucks coffees a month.”

After his first year in Columbus, University President Michael Drake was also approved for a pay increase. However, Drake’s raise — a 2 percent increase to his $800,000 base salary, which equates to an additional $16,000 a year — will cover a bit more than a few mochas.

A Lantern analysis of university employees’ base salaries from the past five years shows Drake is one of many high-ranking administrators who are awarded a median salary increase of 2.4 percent each year.

Full-time teaching faculty saw a median pay increase at the same rate: 2.4 percent a year.

When part-time faculty is included, however, the rates are no longer equal. Median salaries for all instructors increased less than 1 percent.

This discrepancy is driven, at least in part, by the increased hiring of part-time teachers at OSU.

At the same time, the number of full-time educators dropped.

Since 2010, OSU more than tripled its part-time teaching workforce. The number of part-time educators on the payroll increased by an average 146 employees each year.

Over the same period, the number of full-time teachers at OSU decreased by an average of 127 educators each year.

Some higher education experts say they have observed this gap between administrative and faculty salaries at other universities throughout the United States.

“We have seen an increase in administrator salaries,” said Samuel Dunietz, a research and policy analyst for the American Association of University Professors. “On a nationwide trend, it has grown much faster than the rate of faculty salary increases.”
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Dunietz added that there is also an increase in the number of administrative positions. This is coupled with the hiring of more part-time faculty — a trend that’s hardly limited to OSU.

​University spokesman Chris Davey said the administration has initiated several strategies to “make sure that we have the appropriate compensation structure in place for all our employees.”

Davey acknowledged that the increased hiring of part-time instructors contradicts the university’s goal of increasing the number of tenure-track faculty members.

“There was a goal that had been identified of increasing the number of tenure-track faculty that we would have at Ohio State, by between 8 and 10 percent,” Davey said. “And, in fact, the number has decreased, and that’s reflected in the numbers you have identified.”

“That is something that the university is not happy with and that we are working actively to address,” he added “It is a top priority of the academic leadership of Ohio State to determine why this is happening and to get us back on track, not only on reversing that trend but achieving the goal that had been identified some time ago.”

Jani said he thinks unequal administrator and faculty pay, when paired with the increased reliance on part-time teachers, can have adverse effects on education at all levels, not just at colleges and universities.
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“It’s just like teachers in K-12. If you get teachers who aren’t well-paid and who don’t have a kind of security to actually pay attention to students and really give their time, which is why we go into teaching,” he said. “If teachers aren’t given that, then students actually don’t benefit either.”

​Addressing administrative bloat

The growth in the number of employees hired at different levels at colleges and universities has been a topic discussed among higher education professionals for decades.

In its 2013-14 “Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession,” the AAUP included an excerpt of a lead article written for the November-December 1991 issue of “Academe” that criticized the topic of “administrative bloat,” a phrase coined to describe the surge in administrative spending at colleges and universities.

“Undetected, unprotested and unchecked, the excessive growth of administrative expenditures has done a lot of damage to life and learning on our campuses,” wrote Barbara R. Bergmann, then-president of the AAUP and a distinguished professor of economics at American University. “Huge amounts have been devoted to funding administrative positions that a few years ago would have been thought unnecessary … But the bloating of college administrations over the past decades has made administrative performance worse rather than better.”

More than 20 years later, the AAUP’s 2013-14 report showed that full-time, nonfaculty professionals — which the report says includes individuals such as buyers and purchasing agents, human resources employees, lawyers and “other non-academic workers” — showed the most growth between 1975 and 2011. This group of employees grew 369 percent during that time period while full-time senior administrative positions increased 141 percent.

“I think what we’ve seen is that there has been a number of new positions that have been created. In the face of decreasing state appropriations, there are budget implications that come into play,” Dunietz said. “What we are worried about is that is coming at a cost of inhibiting faculty develop, which also inhibits student success. It creates a barrier to student success.”

Some, like Joanne McGoldrick, the associate vice president for total rewards within OSU’s Office of Human Resources, justify high administrator salaries by citing the round-the-clock nature of those positions.

“A president of a university such as Ohio State is a 7/24 position,” she said. “He or she …  is dealing with a community, both nationally and locally, and internationally, and is required to be a fundraiser, a politician, an educator, so salaries of that type of individual would definitely be at a certain rate.”

The Board of Trustees and the Talent and Compensation Committee recently launched a new initiative to address starting salaries for future administrators at the university. The plan will move starting salaries for top administrators closer to the median value for comparable positions at similar universities across the country.

“We are going to establish what the market is paying for any particular position at the senior executive level and when we bring in new people, we will target the median of that market that has been identified empirically,” Davey said.

“That represents a pretty significant shift for the university because previous to the implementation of that system, under Gordon Gee’s leadership, the university targeted the 75th percentile of the market. That is a really significant difference.”

Under the new initiative, salaries will shift to the 50th to 60th percentile, Davey said.

Davey added that over the last fiscal year, members of the president’s cabinet received no raise and one executive voluntarily took a 5 percent salary cut.
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“That is important to note as part of the university’s overall commitment to managing compensation in a way that is frugal and aligned with the market and reflective of our values as an institution,” he said. “As contracts for senior executives are coming up for renewal, each one is being examined with an eye towards our compensation philosophy.”

​Search for solutions

The problems of discrepancies between top administrator and teacher salaries and the changing composition of the workforce with an influx of part-time teachers are seen not only at OSU but nationwide. Several suggestions for remedying these issues have been posited by national organizations such as the AAUP.

“In our report this year, we actually touch on converting those part-time faculty to full-time faculty and the specific costs of that,” Dunietz said. “If you really want to … achieve greater results in research and ensuring student success, this is one option that might not be as drastic as one would think … It is something which would not only help faculty and students, but the institution as a whole.”

While individual universities contemplate implementing this part-time to full-time conversion, smaller scale efforts to incorporate part-time faculty are already being implemented at the department level.

“What we’ve done in the department is a few things to ease the burden of the part-time lecturers in our department, but also to demand more and keep putting in more requests for full-time, tenure-track jobs,” Jani said.
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At OSU, this conversion — if based on current base salaries and full-time equivalents — would increase the payroll for 882 current part-time employees from more than $59 million to almost $123 million with additional undetermined cost of benefits such as retirement contributions and health insurance.

Davey was unable to address OSU’s position on converting part-time teachers into full-time employees, but he did note other potential remedies that the university is currently exploring.

“Some of these include an examination of senior-level administrative salaries that Dr. Drake initiated immediately upon his arrival at Ohio State,” he said. “(And) the establishment by the Board of Trustees of a Talent and Compensation Committee … to oversee a multifaceted approach to executive compensation at the senior level at the university.”

While professors like Jani still see room for improvement in relations between administrators and teaching faculty, he said he appreciates his position at OSU.
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“I have a good job. It’s a well-paying position. I’m happy with it,” he said. “But what happens is the cost of things are constantly going up, and you know for a fact that you’re not valued; what you do is not valued as much as it ought to be.”

To see more photos and to read blog posts from the trip, visit the STEP into Singapore blog.

Our final video project for Multimedia Journalism focused on the topic of educating children with disabilities. In order to showcase this issue, we interviewed teachers in Celina, Ohio, about their experiences incorporating these children into public school classroom environments.

For our first video project in multimedia journalism, we were asked to create a personality profile of an individual or group. The video was to showcase our technical and storytelling skills, as well as our proficiency in editing in Final Cut Pro.

We chose to highlight the Buckeye Fusion Southeast Asian dance team, which is made up of Ohio State students of various cultural backgrounds. They were preparing to send in videos for competitions when we produced this project, and graciously allowed us to film as they practiced.