Notes from a Producer’s Cubicle
Hi there!
It’s been a minute, so allow me to reintroduce myself. My name is Nadya Ellerhorst and in the summer of 2022, I worked as a Communication and Production intern here at Public Media Connect. Throughout those fateful and formative months, I dabbled in Canva wizardry, babysat puppets between takes on all-night location shoots and expertly managed to avoid breaking any equipment. Along the way, I penned a few blog posts about my myriad and varied experiences, from chance encounters with mini-Lamborghinis to escapades in potentially haunted bowling alleys.(Check it out!).
I’ve now returned to PMC as a producer (dreams do come true!) and I currently write to you from my new cubicle. I’m gradually bedazzling it with my personal décor and found objects from around the building, including tinsel from CET’s recent disco-themed 70th Anniversary celebration in Studio A. The natural lighting in here is amazing, and I enjoy people watching from my second-story vantage point over Central Parkway. But what’s especially poignant about this spot is that it also gives me a view of the cubicle from which I worked as an intern – the spot where I wrote all those blog posts just two summers ago.
A lot has transpired in those years since my internship. This May, I graduated with my B.A. from the University of Delaware. While I completed a Journalism minor, spent 4 years on the campus newspaper, and pursued numerous video projects and media-focused internships, I didn’t actually graduate with a degree in Communications, Film, or other specialty that may be expected for folks in a producer position.
I credit my previous time here at PMC for truly unlocking my interest in people-focused media, an interest that I continued to expand upon in any way I could throughout college. After all – as far as I know –there’s no major in “public media.” It’s such a catch-all, ambiguous concept that you really get to define for yourself.
On that note, my educational journey certainly didn’t stop the day I drove away from campus. I may be a producer now, but I’ve realized that an official job title doesn’t exempt you from learning. As Julia Child once said, “The more you know, the more you can create.” I know that there are new modes of storytelling for me to master, production slang for me to pick up, voices out there for me to discover and a supportive community here that will help me along the way.
There’s still the same buzz and excitement here from my intern days, even when things are quiet enough in our office space to hear someone typing four cubicles down, and I think it’s fair to say that I don’t expect that to go anywhere any time soon.
Still it’s true, a great deal has changed at PMC from the last time I was here. The post-production spaces are undergoing renovations, a beautiful, PBS-themed Art Works mural now spans the length of Angelina Ballerina Alley, and the $martPath puppets are tucked away in storage (for now). New shows and podcasts are being produced, and, instead of receiving Art Show stickers from producer Ann Rotolante, now it’s ME that’s handing them out – oh, how the tables have turned! I’m excited to contribute to station blogs once again about some of my adventures as I set sail on this new role. I hope to keep you informed about station goings-on, my experiences on projects for programs like The Art Show and whatever else my new job in public media throws at me – because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in getting to work at PMC, it’s that here, you can always expect the most wonderfully unexpected.
