Everyone has a history behind who they are today. Most know Brittany Fleming as Dr. Fleming, a professor of digital media at Slippery Rock University, adviser to The Rocket and WSRU-TV. Most, however, don't know the experiences and stress she endured throughout her childhood, how she met and came to love her husband, how she ended up at SRU after studying at rival school Indiana University of Pennsylvania for her Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctorate degrees. Most people don't really know the person behind the professor, but she's sharing her story today.
Contrary to what most might believe, Fleming had a relatively unconventional childhood. She said she remembers her childhood fondly, but that it was rough at times. She explained that her parents had her at very young ages — 17 and 18 years old — and divorced when she was only three years old; her mother left, and she didn't see her again until she was 18.
Fleming added that most people assume that she had an easy life, but that's far from the truth, and because of her difficult childhood, she's able to relate more to her students who have challenging home lives. When students talk to her about difficult parents or having to grow up at a young age, she knows she can relate to them.
"If things aren't good at home, things aren't good anywhere else," she said.
Fleming moved with her "unconventional" family to Indiana, Pennsylvania when she was five years old. Growing up, she participated in plenty of extracurriculars, and she said she thrived most when she was at school.
"School was kind of a distraction from home for me," she said. "Strange as this might sound to people who really don't like school that much, but I loved school."
She added that she had a positive relationship with her teachers and that their lasting impact on her was the reason she knew she wanted to be in education. When she began her undergrad, she knew she wanted to work in news and the media, but she wasn't sure exactly which aspect of it.
"Because I competed in dance and was kind of used to being
in the spotlight, I just assumed
I would be a news anchor,"
she said as she jokingly rolled
her eyes. "I thought I would
graduate from college, walk
right into a news station, and
they would put me at the desk."
During her time as an undergraduate student at IUP, Fleming was an anchor and reporter for their student-run
news station, IUP-TV. Much like WSRU-TV, membership was completely voluntary. She went above and beyond what was expected of her, and her hard work paid off.
Toward the end of her undergrad career, she ultimately decided that she wasn't done with school yet. At the beginning of her internship at FOX 53, she received an e-mail about recruitment for a position as a graduate assistant, and she immediately went to her undergraduate adviser. She applied for and earned the graduate assistantship and earned her Master's Degree in Adult Education and Communications Technology at IUP.
"I knew that I learned a lot and that my education was fantastic," Fleming said, "but I kind of still hadn't found exactly where I wanted to be."
She added that she never intended to earn her PhD, but during her time as a grad student, she submitted a 15-page, single-spaced paper to one of her professors at the time — the requirement was only five to ten pages. He asked her if she had thought about getting her Doctorate because he believed her work was "PhD material."
"I thought to myself, if this guy has this much faith in me, and I respect him as much as I do, he has to know what he's talking about," Fleming said. "So why don't I give this a shot?"
She looked at other schools when applying to Doctorate programs, but she ultimately decided to stay at IUP because she wanted to remain close to her family. While earning her PhD, she was actively involved in the department, did a lot of production work and taught production and broadcast news courses all while working on the side as a radio reporter for Renda Broadcasting in Indiana.
When Fleming graduated with her
PhD, she applied to be a professor
at SRU and ironically forgot that she had applied as time passed. Around the same time that she received an
e-mail invitation for an interview from Dr. Douglas Strahler, a professor of communication at SRU, she was offered a promotion by Renda Broadcasting to work at a station in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and
had to decide between the two opportunities.
"So I had to kind of decide: am I going to go into the industry and do everything I teach, or am I going to work with students, which is what I really, really want to do anyway?" she said. "It was such a great opportunity, and when I interviewed here, I knew it was exactly where I needed to be."
Her new position at SRU didn't come without challenges. Within her first year, she began advising WSRU-TV, the campus's student-run television station. The students who participated were very dedicated and hard-working, but there wasn't a lot of structure to the organization. She said the first thing she wanted to do as adviser was gain her students' trust.
"It was their organization, their show, their content," Fleming said. "I just wanted to help them make it a little bit better so that everything they were doing was portfolio-worthy."
She knew, even during her initial interview, that she wanted to converge WSRU-TV and The Rocket, the campus's student-run newspaper. After her second semester at SRU, she also became the adviser to The Rocket; she said it was one of the hardest things she's ever done.
"Just like I had my thing going on with WSRU-TV, The Rocket had their thing going on with Dr. Zeltner," Fleming said. "The Rocket has been around for a lot longer, is very visible on campus and is the number-one news source for campus."
She said that even though there was definite tension and anxiety at first, she let her students run the newspaper the way they always had during her first semester as adviser, and she slowly introduced and suggested small changes. Now WSRU-TV and The Rocket work together and collaborate regularly.
"They're honestly my favorite people in the world," Fleming said of her students.