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Photo: courtesy of Matador
[UPDATE 6/01/10 - Congratulations Alina Rădulescu (@Ariko) for winning this week's Twitter contest at MatadorU!!]
MORE STUDENTS continue enrolling at MatadorU, and the student-teacher interaction, work being shared / critiqued, and strength of our community just keeps progressing. We’re in the process of compiling a complete page on what people are saying, but in the meantime, here are a few quotes from students
Still, we’d like for more people to participate, and so we’re having a special enrollment week / Twitter contest this week. Here’s how it works:
Starting today, and running until next Tuesday, at 12:00 pm EST, we’re offering a promotional code at the U that will give you $40 off your enrollment of either the Travel Photography or Travel Writing programs. Register here using the code: TWITTERPROMO
Additionally, you qualify to win FREE enrollment by doing the following three steps (should take less than 30 secs)–
1) Make sure you follow us @MatadorNetwork so we can get in touch if you win.
2) Post the tweet below to your own Twitter account to help us spread the word about the contest.
3) Leave your @twitter_user_name in the comments below, along with the reason why why you want to join MatadorU.
We’ll be looking at the comments over the next week, and choose whoever seems like they’ll benefit most from the course.
HOW DO I KNOW IF I WON?
Winners will be announced next Tuesday at the end of the contest via twitter, and also update here via a post at Matador.
Good luck to everyone, and we look forward to announcing the winner!
David Miller
David Miller is Senior Editor of Matador (winner of 2010 and 2011 Lowell Thomas awards for travel journalism) and Director of Curricula at MatadorU. Follow him @dahveed_miller.
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my Twitter is @iamjosie I love traveling and photography and I want to win so I can learn about travel photography
My twitter is @Ariko
I am 100% Romanian; however, I have a very diverse cultural background which steers my passion to increase my knowledge of different cultures and to discover and enjoy diversity. I love to travel and I take every opportunity to do so. So far I have travelled to Europe, Africa and Asia. I have also been an exchange student in Japan for one year. I found this opportunity very challenging and all my adventures are presented on a personal blog which enjoyed quite a success in the Romanian blogosphere. Since I have returned from Japan I joined travel communities and I depicted my experiences to travel lovers in a local conference. I will be graduating this year with a major in Communication Studies and Japanese. My dissertation focuses on traditions and rituals regarding mountains and mountain’s gods in Japanese folklore and religion. It is based on a research I did during my stay in Japan and it enjoys great appreciation among my lecturers and my peers. This real passion for folklore and local traditions encourages me to want to continue researching different themes and I think this will also imply a lot of travelling. I look forward to what the future holds and I already have strong beliefs about what I want to achieve further. I decided to share my experience on a larger scale; therefore I will be blogging in English this time. I think I could greatly benefit from this course, which would give me a good insight into English readers’ interests. My passion for travelling is complemented by a keen passion for languages. Except from Romanian I can speak English, Spanish, Japanese and a resonable level of French. I am proficient in English; hence I do not think the content of the course would pose any problems to me. I believe that I have a lot to offer to the travelling community due to my interest in local aspects and my capacity to surprise usual facts and events.
I’m pretty new to writing and even newer to travel writing, but it’s something that I just find I have an uncontrollable urge to do – to learn from other cultures, to explore, to enquire, and to document that in my own way. Why do other people travel? What influences different cultures to express themselves in the way they do? What can we learn about ourselves from interacting with others and opening ourselves to new experiences? Why do we embrace certain opportunities as travellers but not others?
I’ve just handed in my notice after 11 years in the NHS – short staffing and beaurocracy have taken their toll on my sanity and I’ve realised there is more to life. I’m not expecting to make millions from writing, but I’d love to be able to make a living from it in some way. I’ve no idea how to start making it pay though, and that’s where I’m stuck. If I can get feedback and advice on my work through MatadorU to help make it more accessible and marketable, then that would be just amazing.
I’m @ellyoracle on twitter and my writing (on various subjects, but as far as travel is concerned there’s a fair bit about Iceland) is on http://oracleroulette.com
I skipped off to University with high hopes my degree would reignite the creative passion that seemed to have all but disappeared during my monotonous high school years. But the same wearisome work continued; I was not intellectually stimulated and my creative passion didn’t reignite with the burst I so craved. So after a year and a half, I decided to quit ‘being boring’ to explore and rediscover my passions whilst developing talents along the way.
I was lucky enough to be have been bitten by the travel bug at a young age as my parents have a keen interest in travel. Unfortunately, traveling with two young children can prove expensive and our family travels had to be put on hold until recently.
After an inspiring trip to Hong Kong, Macau and a little way into China I realized that my collection of business cards, napkins, furious scribbles in a purple flip-note book and memory card full of photos shouldn’t be wasted and stuffed in some closet with my mementos of school camping trips, and macaroni necklaces I made when I was four. I could create a travel blog.
The issue it now seems, as I pack to leave for my solo RTW venture, is that I have the skeleton of a site, I have a few posts and I have a list of potential stories to write, but I don’t know how to effectively edit my articles. I don’t fully understand how to build a solid base of contacts and I don’t have the faintest clue about how to market myself efficiently for publications.
I am hoping by taking part in MatadorU’s writing course I can turn the list of things I can’t do, into things I can do, as well as learning other skills – such as video, podcasting and photography, which will help me to reach my aim of becoming a professional travel writer.
@NicoleTravelBug
I’m not going to say that I deserve to win enrollment at MatadorU anymore than the commentors before me. Each one of us are striving to achieve our own personal dreams and ambitions of becoming more effective travel writers. All I can say is that I deeply share this passion with my peers and hope that luck is on my side.
Thank you for offering the course and this opportunity.
Ryley (@ry1ey)
@abhijit_gupta
I love traveling, and more than that, being able to appreciate the beauty of a place through writing. I realize that that, at times, the writing is never sufficient to truly describe the amazing experience that travel can be. Therefore, I want to polish my writing and publishing skills to reach out to more people and make a bigger impact. Of course, MatadorU’s Travel Writing program is the best resource to do that!!
Traveling around the world is a dream I have had since childhood. Being able to record the adventures into printed words; to be able to bring alive the different locales and cultures would indeed be a dream come true.