Hi, I’m Jake Swain
a bartender, student, and writer who is passionate about helping people tell their stories and learning from those stories.
Image Credit: Jake Swain
Image Credit: "Where Words Ignite Worlds"
I really wanted to have an opinion piece that shows who I am as a person and lays out my values. I wanted to focus on my own self-efficacy.
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For this I chose a piece that I wrote for Rhythm & Revolution about my personal history with punk culture and the impact that it had on my politics and social beliefs. For this I had to research the history of the punk subculture and learn what the community stands for and where marginalized communities fit within the subculture. I also had to reflect on my own views and culture to learn my place within the subculture. Through this reflection I came to realize how much of an impact music has had on my worldview. Reading this piece again helped me to realize that I had developed a skill for making messages consumable and presenting my message to an audience.
Read some more of my writing below!
Analyzing Messages
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I love music, and I love talking about music. I wanted to include that in one of the writing samples I chose. When talking about music, you almost always end up discussing the messages that the artists are striving to send.
I chose a paper that I wrote for Rhythm & Revolution that I believe show my ability to break down a message and discuss it.
The first paper that I chose is about the band U2 and their protest song "Sunday Bloody Sunday" in which I analyzed the song, its lyrics, and a live performance. Evaluating and analyzing messages is a competency that I am confident in and it is important because it allows me to effectively determine the efficiency of a communication method and whether or not we reached the people that we intended to reach.
Message analysis is an important competency that I wanted to display, so I chose another piece of writing for this purpose. In this paper that I wrote for my Public Communication class, I examined the advertising campaigns of the two Indianapolis mayoral candidates from 2023's race. During this analysis I examined the television advertisements presented by both candidates and used theoretical lenses to determine the effectiveness of each advertisement. This is, in my opinion, one of my best pieces and does an excellent job of displaying my ability to critically examine messages.
Skills
Communication
Analyzing Messages
Collaboration
Creative Writing
Applying Communication Theory
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Theory is an important aspect of how messages get to their audiences and how they are received. I felt that it was important for me to display my understanding of theory and show that I am able to explain, apply, and critique communication theory. For this, I chose a paper from my Persuasion and Social Movements class where we had to examine a specific movement and discuss what theories applied to that particular group. I chose to write about the climate change movement that started in the late 90s and continues on today and the persuasive and languaging tactics used by both sides of the movement.
BA Indiana University, Indianapolis
Date: August 2021-May 2025
For my department capstone class, we participated in a team-based Applied Communication Project (ACP). During this project, we were tasked, as a class, with running interventions to raise awareness of a variety of topics about AI. My team chose to focus on AI scams.
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For our intervention, we started a fresh Instagram account with the idea of targeting college aged students and generating awareness of how AI scams can impact not only them, but their loved ones as well. The image to the right is an Instagram post that I created for this project. We wanted to use real-life stories of people impacted by AI scams to really hammer home just how real these can be.
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This post was viewed 59 times and received 7 interactions. 5.1% of those views were from non-followers.
By far, the most apparent competency learned and displayed by this project is collaboration. During our intervention, we met regularly to discuss where the project was at, plan posts, and keep up to date on anything related to the class and the project. We had to coordinate schedules and problem solve as technology issues arose.
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This post also demonstrates my ability to create messages that are appropriate to an audience and purpose. During our intervention, we wanted to target college aged students to raise awareness about AI-based scams. We thought that sharing stories about real people who had been impacted would be a good use of our platform. I chose this story because I wanted to reach people who have older family members who could also be targeted. In a way, we were targeting an elderly population through the college-aged demographic by hoping that the students would take this information and share it with their parents, grandparents, or other elderly family/friends.