Kat Crowe, Class of 2016 

I remember before Hurricane Sandy swept the east coast, it was such a joke to everyone. Chris Christie came to each town, exclaiming “all the beach towns must evacuate!”  Just the year previous, New Jersey experienced Hurricane Irene, Christie repeated the same words as before, the media told everyone to leave, but nothing serious happened except some minor flooding after the hurricane came. Everyone made such a big deal about it, but nothing serious occurred. But, Hurricane Sandy was a completely different situation.

I am from Keansburg, New Jersey, which is located on the Shore of Monmouth County; a beach and amusement park along the shoreline facing New York City. Hurricane Sandy’s winds broke the flood gates at Raritan Bay and caused the whole bay to flood into my town. Up to nine feet of water swept through the amusement park and the proceeding streets.

My friends all over town found refrigerators, ski ball machines, boats, and cars that they did not own, on their streets and front lawns. Sandy had not only completely wrecked my town’s main source of revenue, but it displaced two thousand families out of eleven thousand. Keansburg is not an affluent district; the average income for families is about forty-four thousand dollars a year. Knowing that my town would need more help than ever, I decided to start a fundraiser where all the proceeds would go to the re-establishment of those who lost their homes.

My fundraiser started off with two-hundred bracelets that stated “Jersey Strong” on them. Each bracelet cost two dollars each and within the first forty-eight hours of me selling them, I made six-hundred dollars with only one-hundred bracelets sold. I made a PayPal account so anyone could buy the bracelets online or just donate. I have sent bracelets to people in South Carolina, Florida, Maine, Missouri, Oregon, California, and Arizona. The news of these bracelets has spread across the country. So far, I have sold five-hundred bracelets and have made sixteen hundred dollars in profit. I have four hundred more bracelets coming to me and I will be continuing my fundraiser through Fun Without Drinking and the Keansburg School District.

If you would still like to buy a bracelet, you can easily contact me through Facebook at Kat Crowe or look up “Keansburg Jersey Strong Fundraiser,” which is my open event that anyone can join! I never believed that my fundraiser would be so successful.  Based on the generous donations I have received, I have a lot of faith in my fellow Ithaca College Students, friends and family back home, and the general public.

Sara Gardner, Class of 2013

You pass by tons of people in the course of a day, people who you don’t know and probably will never see again. I find this to be extremely fascinating, the fact that we all exist here at this point in time together, but each person has their own life that they are the center of, their own personal struggles and their own triumphs.

Looking around online one day, I stumbled upon a picture of a silhouette with a quote written on it: “When you look at someone, remember that everyone has a story. Everyone has gone through something that has changed their life, their hearts, and their destiny… Including you.”

Something about this quote resonates with me. It isn’t just celebrities, athletes, people you Facebook stalk, etc. that have interesting and often inspiring stories. Everybody, including yourself, has a story that has the potential to be meaningful to somebody other than you.

My classmate, Ryan Haddon, first proposed a project like this to me at the beginning of the semester and I was more than happy to scrap the script I had been working on in favor of exploring this idea more. We wanted to chronicle the stories of the every day person – incredible, mundane, horrifying, depressing, exciting stories – and really delve into the emotions behind each specific scenario.

After interviewing a few people, we began to find that a common theme seemed to appear with the stories. Even though we had asked for one story about any emotion, the one that most people chose to talk about was one of loss, or of overcoming a problem or struggle of some sort.

This struck me as very interesting, and also very telling. We hold on to our memories where we hit our lowest low, yet so easily we forget our stereotypical “gold medal” moments. When asked to tell a story of personal significance, we search for one where we prevailed over sadness - a story in which human resilience shines.

From this concept is where my senior Television-Radio thesis was born. We are interviewing people and asking them to tell a story. We do not stipulate what the story should be about, or what we want it to be about, however the stories seemingly all fit together.

Ryan and I with our thesis project tentatively titled “Resilience,” we are hoping to immerse viewers within these stories and make the audience recall a moment where they experienced those same emotions. This is also meant to truly be an experience for the viewer, as it is an experimental video installation piece that will be projected on four walls in the room that we did the interviews in.

We are still currently in production and will be conducting one last round of interviews on Monday, Nov. 26 from 6pm to 9pm in Room 140 in the Roy H. Park School. Please feel free to stop by during that time or send me an email if you are interested in participating!

If you are interested in viewing the final product, we will be showing our piece on Friday, December 14 in Room 140. The rest of the Television-Radio senior thesis students will be presenting their work that evening as well, so be sure to come by Park and check it out!