AboutMe
My name is Jeremiah St. John, and if there's two things in the world that I am familiar with, it's writing, and music.
My initial venture into college was met with auditions at FSU's college of music, where I was accepted into the Jazz Studies program, and was awarded tutelage from trombonist, Paul Mckee. I also had the privilege to work with other jazz greats on the faculty such as Leon Anderson, William Kennedy, Bill Peterson, and leader of the Count Basie Orchestra, legendary trumpeter Scotty Barnhart. Despite being part of the leading Jazz ensembles since my inception into the university, I couldn't forgo my love of writing, in particular, the complex - often jaded - rhetorical theories of authors such as Benjamin, Burke, Focault, and Derrida. Late into my junior year, my interest in rhetoric and writing inflated to the point that I decided to double major, in addition to my B.A. in Jazz Studies, picking up Editing, Writing, and Media as my second degree path.
Editing, Writing, and Media, from my subjective point of view, was the least discriminatory major within the College of English, allowing me to custom tailor my efforts into rhetoric studies, lit classes that dealt with issues of post-modernism and its psychological parallel of reality fragmentation, as well as text technologies. If anything, it allowed me to explore my interests in a manner that was more tangential, rather than well thought out, rare in a collegiate setting. Thankfully however, as I grew and developed as a student my interests turned to the application of writing towards marketing, and the simple, yet semantic execution of words to effect an emotional reaction where otherwise there would be none.
Such as it was, Writing and Editing in Print Online was the class where developing an organized twitter campaign and working with a team of students to coordinate a message and brand for ourselves, led me to seek out an internal organization within the university where I could further explore these skills.
While my set of knowledge didn't pertain to the creative side (the graphic design, the layouts, illustrations, etc.) I was able to secure myself within the Office of Communications by completing research against competing collegiate entities, as well as performing trend analaysis for the FSU tag growth, and writing press releases for South Florida that put me more into Journalistic role.
In a sense, I was exposed to all sides of the market; research, to highlight competition and to identify where the brand needed to move forward, and news, for publicity and to connect the brand to individuals that can form a more immediate connection with readers.
As I move forward, my thoughts continually turn towards grad school for rhetorical studies of social media or text theory. However, in the meantime, I plan to use my position here at the univeristy to further garner insight into the industry, before returning home to Ft. Myers, to apply this knowledge to a coffee roasting venture with my lifelong friend.
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