Summer is the slow time of year at the New England School of Communications in Bangor. The students are gone, and the parking lots at Husson University are mostly empty. But the George E. Wildey Communications Center, named for NESCom’s founder, is never entirely quiet. On a weekday in mid-July, Rodney Verrill stands in a television studio, his feet surrounded by coils of cable, as several other men position consoles, cameras, and other electronic equipment around him.
“Our big push this year is conversion to high-definition,” says Verrill, NESCom’s executive director of video programming. “The Friday that classes got out, we started construction, or rather, at first, destruction.”
What looked like a mess in July has become a state-of-the-art video recording studio by September, as 500 students aiming toward careers in communications return to campus or arrive for the first time. There they will find the very latest in audio and video broadcasting equipment, in keeping with the school’s philosophy of hands-on learning from the first week of the first semester.
“We take them right into professional expectations,” says executive vice president and academic dean Ben Haskell. “Their freshman year, they’re going to get hands-on equipment training.”
The equipment is constantly upgraded. Much of it is leased, for three years at a time, and rotated out as newer, more modern equipment becomes available. Few industries change as fast as audio and video production, and NESCom’s mission is to turn out graduates able to step into that fast-paced world with, in Haskell’s words, “a minimum amount of trauma.”
What started in 1981 in the mind of George Wildey as a one-year school for radio broadcasters has morphed into a four-year college offering three bachelor of science degrees in communications technologies, media studies, and, starting this fall, entertainment production. It’s grown from an initial class of 23 students to nearly 500, with some 40 full-time staff and 50 adjunct professors. It’s moved from an office building in downtown Bangor to a modern facility on the campus of Husson University. And it’s changed its name from the New England School of Broadcasting to the New England School of Communications.
“It’s like a ball rolling downhill—you don’t get in the way, and you try to stay with it,” says Wildey. Now retired and splitting his time between Maine and Florida, Wildey sits on Husson’s board of trustees and consults regularly on issues concerning the school.
Wildey came to Maine in 1962 to take a job at the University of Maine’s department of public information as the school’s first director of radio and television. The genesis for what became NESCom came from Maine radio stations looking for on-air talent.
Thirty years later, the school is booming in a way he never imagined.
“The move to Husson really was the key,” Wildey says. “[Former Husson president] Bill Beardsley and I were on the same wavelength. He was as much a booster of NESCom as I was.”
“It was very timely,” Haskell says. “We were good for the campus, and the campus was good for us. Bill Beardsley was very big on entrepreneurial ventures and saw us as a prime example of that. We started getting into other areas besides radio and television. In 1998, we got approval for a bachelor of science degree program. This building was in the works. Once this building opened, the school started growing by leaps and bounds.”
Haskell, who in 1988 became NESCom’s first full-time employee, came from the world of radio broadcasting. “In my day, it was tapes, records, reel-to-reel, and cassettes and carts,” he says. “When you wanted to go to the bathroom you had to put the needle down on ‘American Pie’. Now you can voice track and walk away for half a day. It’s a challenge for young disc jockeys or announcers today to keep themselves sharp and keep up their personality development.”
Though NESCom is wholly owned by Husson, it’s a symbiotic relationship, according to Thomas Johnston, NESCom’s president. “In terms of the educational component, we are a separate institution,” he says. “We’re separately accredited; we have separate degree-granting authority. There’s a strong collaboration in terms of our students and student life. NESCom and Husson students live together in the dorms, they eat together in the dining commons, they participate in all social activities on campus. This summer, Husson received permission from the NCAA for NESCom students to play intercollegiate sports, which had been something that they couldn’t do, so you’ll see a few NESCom students playing on Husson teams this fall.”
Even in mid-summer, it’s not unusual to catch a few students around. At WHSN-FM, Corey Chandler, a NESCom junior, hosts “Unbalanced Breakfast,” monitoring a playlist of alternative rock tunes punctuated by news and weather updates. On his right is a touch screen with the day’s playlist, which he can adjust if, for example, he’s taking requests. On his left is a mouse-driven screen from which he can read weather, public service announcements, and news, edited and prepared by other NESCom students.
The station is non-commercial, and can be heard in an area roughly bounded by Lincoln, Skowhegan, and Ellsworth. It broadcasts around the clock, though in the small hours, everything is automated. “We play a lot of local bands,” Chandler says. “We get a lot of our music digitally, though we do have a CD player—I had to use it last week.”
In another part of the building, a group of seniors gathers to plan a semester-long audio production project. Between now and December, they will recruit a local music group and record and produce a commercial-quality collection of songs—an album, in the old parlance. The hall outside the recording studio is lined with framed prints of famous LP covers by the Beatles, Blondie, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin. Inside, the drum kit is isolated in its own room; the walls sport three-dimensional sound-dampening devices that could be mistaken for art pieces; guitars and amps are in evidence but not yet in use; a 32-channel mixing board looms over it all.
“They get going early,” Johnston says. “It takes longer than a full semester to pull everything together, including managing musicians, which isn’t always easy. But the whole model of the industry has changed. What once cost millions of dollars now costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. While that doesn’t sound like a huge difference, in that profession, it’s a mammoth difference. Recording studios are able to spring up for relatively lower cost. New York and Los Angeles are no longer the only places you can go to get a decent recording. You can go virtually any place in the world and find recording studios. You can record some of your tracks in Singapore and some of your tracks in London and some of them in Bangor, Maine and have someone in Orlando put it together.”
Audio engineering remains NESCom’s largest program. Video production is second. The building contains several large studios, smaller editing bays and mixing rooms, a number of offices, a small lecture hall, and computer lab, but perhaps surprisingly, few traditional classrooms.
“That’s the beauty of our relationship with Husson,” Johnston explains. Students are required to take general education courses outside of their technical specialty, as in any four-year degree program. Many of these classes are taught by NESCom faculty in Husson classrooms, though NESCom students can also take Husson classes for credit.
“We couldn’t have done the bachelor’s program without this university,” Haskell says. “We weren’t big enough to have that kind of staff. Our students, through a consortium agreement, were able to take courses taught by Husson instructors.”
General education courses are a large part of the curriculum. Many general ed classes are now taught by NESCom’s own full-time and adjunct professors. Though they are training students to enter a technical world, they aren’t overlooking the basics.
“All four years here, they’re going to hear about the importance of good oral and written communication,” Haskell says. “As a communications school, we still have to teach some of the basics: public speaking, business writing, how to talk to people, how to write to people. They’re so used to the shortcuts of instant messaging. We still ask them to do it the old-fashioned way, to lay down a good foundation, so they don’t embarrass themselves.”
Although 70% of the students are from Maine, many of them will leave the state after graduation. One recent graduate landed a position as an assistant to the director of entertainment on a cruise ship line, which is not the first line of work one might think of for an audio engineer, but Johnston says such opportunities abound for savvy students with a good technical background.
But NESCom isn’t just turning out technicians. “The market for content is huge,” Johnston says. “Look at cable television—all those channels. And there are people producing all that content. You may not like it all. But that content has a market, it has advertisers. And there’s a team behind it that has to produce it. That is where our students are finding their professional careers. And it’s not just video. There’s an audio component, a graphics component, a marketing component.”
Another big market is sports journalism. Out back, behind the in-house television studio, sits the school’s mobile production unit, which, from the outside, looks like a big truck. Inside is a production facility every bit as sophisticated as the one in the building.
“It’s basically a television station on wheels,” Verrill says. “This is one of the only units of its kind on the east coast that an educational institution owns and operates, rather than renting out on a case-by-case basis.”
It’s not used only for sports events, but you will see it parked at the Bangor Auditorium for the Eastern Maine high school basketball tournament and at soccer fields and baseball diamonds throughout the area. “Last semester, we did 25 events in 14 weeks,” Verrill says. “Often this thing rolls out at five in the morning, and we don’t get back until midnight.”
Teams of students and teachers work together, sometimes spending weeks in the planning process. “Our philosophy is ‘Plan your work and work your plan’,” Verrill says. “Students are doing the planning, with guidance. They have the opportunity to try each position and find their niche.”
Another teaching/learning venue is the Gracie Performing Arts Center, which opened on the Husson campus three years ago. Students can learn how to run live sound and lighting systems for concerts and stage performances. “They use the stage as a sound laboratory,” Johnston says. The sound and lighting control rooms are larger than their equivalents at a commercial theater, to accommodate groups of students watching the technicians in action. Like everything else in the audio and video world, live theater has incorporated new technology, from intelligent lighting systems run by computer, to mixing boards, which control the sound and can modify it for different sections of the theater, or even for a hearing aid in the ear of someone in attendance.
Back in the Wildey Center, student Greg Winningham has closeted himself in a small video editing room. The Hermon High grad is a senior this fall, but he’s spent the summer shooting and producing a safety video for Sappi Fine Paper in Skowhegan, on a paid internship arranged by the school. It’s a 45-minute piece, including, among other things, aerial shots of the mill.
“They sent me up in an airplane with another photographer,” he explains. “It’s been a fun summer job. I’ve learned a lot, especially about connecting with people.”
Connecting NESCom with the outside world is what Bill Devine does best. As the school’s placement director, he spends much of his time on the phone to employers around the country. He’s also in charge of the internship program, which allows students like Winningham to hone their professional skills, and, in some cases, get paid while still in school.
“In [Winningham’s] case, Sappi reached out to us,” Devine says. “Their safety officer came to NESCom and interviewed the two candidates. It was a difficult choice, because both were well-qualified. Greg is a paid staff member there this summer.”
Approximately 30 students earn full-time summer internships. They must have completed their junior year, have a grade point average of at least 3.0, and get a faculty recommendation. NESCom interns this past summer worked at CBS News in New York City and in audio production in San Francisco. “Coast to coast and everywhere in between,” Devine says.
“I love the internship program,” he continues. “It’s important for real-world work experience, and it’s the easiest way for the school to build a reputation for quality employees.”
During the school year, many students are engaged in local internships, with, for example, Bangor television and radio stations. These are typically part-time positions, which allow the student to take classes at the same time.
“We have to be a little bit careful,” Haskell says. “We’re still a school; we’re not a production house. It needs to be tied to a learning experience. We can’t be in full competition with people who do this for a living.”
Still, he says, the internship program is invaluable. The school works with a large number of nonprofit agencies, which creates a win-win situation: the agency might not be able to afford a professional-quality production otherwise, and a student can gain real-world experience prior to going out into a competitive job market.
“Our goal is employment, not just graduation,” Haskell says. “We keep close tabs with the industry that hires our students. We have industry representatives on our advisory committee. Our faculty come out of the industry and some are still involved in it, so they can tell us immediately what’s changing, what we need to be teaching that we aren’t, what we no longer need to be teaching because it’s passé, what we need with the latest software. We look for that; we seek that. And that’s what our employers want to see. They don’t want to retrain to any great extent. They want that young person to hit the deck running. We’re always tweaking and changing.”
