Inspiration and energy from a free spirit and twitter

From @okieprof, #clarkclass

The joys of this job are the students, present and past, and my current students in twitter for media today were energized and inspired by a former student, Heide Brandes, @HeideWrite.
Heide is a free spirit who lives life to the fullest. She's succeeded as a community journalist and a PR professional, and now as a freelance writer and professional belly dancer.
Her talks with the class are off the wall, like her, wide open where everything can be discussed, and so full of practical advice about life and living, in addition to her careers.
When I asked the class general impressions before we began our debriefing, one female student , Chandler Murphy @cmurphy119 just said, "Wow."
For the record, Heide is the student who appeared in an ad with me promoting UCO. Yes, she's also a belly dancer and owns a belly dancing school. Energy personified, in her very early 40s.
Here, recorded by current student student Alyssa Ramsey @alyssaramsey13, a photography major are my students' debriefing impressions of Heide.

• Cool how she doesn’t really care and she is honest and upfront about her work. She is professional, but in her own way
• Makes me want to quit my job and just do what I want to do for the rest of my life
• Freelancing is really cool and if you can make it work it would be a really cool job to have
• She said “always tweet with value, don’t tweet when you’re pissed off.” If more young people did that on social media we would all be better off
• If you can help people on twitter do it. It shows that you’re engaged.
• Don’t be afraid for what you want. The worst thing you can do is not go for it
• She made a blog post that was about how to clean up your digital footprint
• She used hash tags to research things on twitter
• She said don’t try to fit in. Stop trying so hard and be your own person
• Be genuine but also be careful. You can get a long way being yourself
• Huge thing for people to realize that fighting with others on twitter will really reflect in your personal and professional life
• If you say something about a specific political party, you never know what your future employers' beliefs will be; it could hurt you in the long run.
• Posting pictures getting wasted or posting things while under the influence will hurt you
• It's not the end of the world if you make mistakes, you always learn from your mistakes
• Be engaging--if you see something someone said that you like tell them. If people mention you reply
• If you want to be an excellent writer be an excellent reader. It gives you a sense of credibility
• It's good to have boundaries of what you won’t write about
• 30 to 40 stories a month is a lot of stories and she is still free-spirited and doesn’t let it bog her down--she is very positive
• should know, need to know, want to know
• If you don’t ask you’ll never know. Twitter helps with that now it makes it easier to contact people.
• Twitter is your business card
• She gets a lot of leads and jobs from hashtags on twitter
• Talked about how exciting her life was being a freelance writer
• Hashtags will tell you what's important and what people are talking about
• Who she follows is very important because that’s how she gets news stories and resources

Here's the newspaper ad we appeared in together, thanks to her talking to my administration.