Times Square, City lights, and shopping are all things that usually come to mind when thinking of one of the nation’s most visited locations, New York City. However for some students at Woodland, NYC brings forth the idea of new knowledge and provides a wider range of learning opportunities.

On March 19th, 20th, and 21st students from Woodland’s Journalism Department, Student Council, and Creative Writing class will venture into the city in order to learn more about the fields they are interested in. At this three day conference, which takes place at Columbia University students will sit in on a variety of different classes of their choice and learn more in the fields they are interested in.

For Woodland’s Journalism Department taking the trip to Columbia University has been a tradition. This year, nine students from the department will journey to Columbia in order to broaden their scope and hopefully learn ways to improve their newspaper, videos, photos, and online media skills.

For the first time ever the journalism department will not only be learning while there, but two students will also be working along side Journalism Director, Jim Amato, to teach a class to others attending the conference. Students, Katie Moody and Katie Drewry, will help others at the conference learn how to use Google Hangouts to live broadcast sporting, musical, and other school events for free.

“We’re really excited to be able to teach a class at Columbia for the first time,” said Drewry. “I’ve attended the conference for two years now and last year we were actually asked to speak in front of one of the classes we attended. This year we decided that it would be a good to actually go about teaching the class in order to help others expand their journalism departments as well.”

While, Moody and Drewry will be focusing on the aspect of helping others, a number of freshmen in the program will be attending to learn for themselves.  Students will have the choice to attend classes focused on newspaper, yearbook, magazine, online media, video/broadcasting, and law and ethics depending on their interests. There are also classes that focus on the group advisers so they can also learn ways of improving their departments also.

Coming back from the city the Journalism Department hopes to have a new variety of ideas that will help keep people not only interested in what they are doing, but knowledgable about what is going on in their school and community.

“Going to Columbia this year we’re really hoping to find ways to improve our work,” said Drewry. “It will be important for us to learn a better way to manage putting out both a newspaper and keeping up with our online website. By attending this conference not only will our department be able to bond, but we will come back ready to work with new ideas.”