Dear Kelly:

The day after we got back from taking you to college, I cleaned your room. For a long time. I took all the bed sheets off your bed ā€” right down to the mattress ā€” washed them, put them all back, perfectly making your bed. I had flipped the mattress and ironed your pillow cases. I even starched them so the creases are perfect and they lay just so.

I dusted every surface in your room (do you get any of that Bare Minerals powder on your face?), and shined anything that was left. No nook or cranny was left untouched.

I steamed the wood floors clean and found 37 bobby pins and 16 pony tail holders. I even picked up seven tiny rubber bands from when you had braces in middle school.

When it was done, it looked amazing. Smelled amazing. When Dad got home, I showed it off to him. ā€œLook at how clean this room is,ā€ I beamed.

Every morning I go in there to see it. And guess what? It looks the same. Every day itā€™s still clean. No half-empty Gatorade bottles on your dresser. No empty yogurt containers with the spoon glued to the side on your desk. No yoga pants on the floor.

This morning, I stood in the doorway for a long time. And I realized something. I like it better messy with you in it.

Love,
Mom

I cried as I wrote that letter. But I also saw it as my acceptance of her moving out of our lives and creating her own. After all, that was our dream for her.

A month ago, she graduated from college. Her dietetics degree requires her to complete a year of unpaid internships in clinical and community settings before she takes her state boards and becomes employable. Kelly set those up in her hometown to save us the expense of housing. So she has moved back home, into her room.

She returned with three times the amount of stuff she left with, the result of having her first apartment, her own kitchen gadgets, and dƩcor items collected over four years of shopping at Target and crafted after too much time spent on Pinterest.

It took a week to sort, box, store it, and stuff it into closets and our garage until the day she leaves our home, a second time, to start her life, again.

Her room is messy, just like it was her whole life. In the letter I penned four years before, I said I liked it better that way. I might have lied.

She was more honest when she said, months before her graduation, she was not excited about moving back into her parentsā€™ house. It is not that we have a long list of rules, or impose 11 p.m. curfews, or monitor her every move. We do not. It is understandable she loved being independent in college, as she displayed strong traits of being independent as a toddler.

So I am trying to be a cool mom. To give her a wide berth. To make her feel like she can be independent even if she is living in her old room, in her old house, with her old parents. I have no idea if it is working.

But I had a sign, however small yet significant, that it just might be. A little. Last weekend, she cleaned her room. She washed her sheets, made her bed, vacuumed and mopped the wood floor, and dusted all the surfaces.

And I didnā€™t even have to ask.

Joan McCain is an associate instructor and program coordinator of the advertising/public relations major in Ā鶹Ō­““ā€™s Nicholson School of Communication. She can be reached at Joan.McCain@ucf.edu.

Dear Soon-to-be College Freshman:

Here is my advice, brought to you by my two decades of teaching at a university.

Tip #1. COLLEGE IS NOT HIGH SCHOOL.

This is a different league and you need to step up your game. Do not whine, do not expect hand-holding and do not blame your teachers if you have to put in extra effort, time or even actually study. The average college freshman had a high school GPA of 3.9 and spent two to three hours a week studying. It will not be like that in college. Adjust. Suck it up. Learn the value of hard work, and use it to your advantage. And know this absolute truth: Hard work is the great equal opportunity equalizer because anyone can work hard.

Tip #2. IT IS OKAY TO GET A ā€œC.ā€

Yes, a college teacher said that to you. It is okay to get a C (or even a D) ifā€”and this is a big ifā€”you have done the work and tried your best. To get into college, you were convinced grades were the most important thing in the world, and along the way you have come to believe it is a measure of your self-worth. Stop it right now. No one hires someone for a job based on a GPA. Your grades do not define you, and they do not demonstrate your potential in the worldā€”as long as you did everything you could, put the time in the course, and did your best. You will be hiredā€”and judged and promoted in jobs in the real worldā€”by your work ethic, your ability to take responsibility for your actions, and by your passion for what you are doing. So, work hard, care about learning, but when you get a C, do not cry. Do not feel defeated. Learn from it and try things a different way.

Tip #3. YOUR PROFESSOR IS NOT YOUR FRIEND BUT YOU CAN BE FRIENDLY.

When a professor says something that inspires you, gives a great lecture, organizes the class well, when you understand something you never understood beforeā€”tell him or her. Go up after class or send an email or go to his or her office, introduce yourself and say it. Some students think that is sucking up. It is not if you mean it. It is building a relationship. This is valuable practice for life, as relationships are all that matter. Get to know your professors. (They also recommend you for jobs and scholarships.)

Tip #4. LEARN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RESPECTING SOMEONE AND LIKING SOMEONE.

You are not going to like every professor you have. Some will be tough, some will be scatterbrained, some will be nerds. Doesn’t matter. Respect them. No matter what. They are your teachers, they are in charge of the classes, and you don’t have to agree with or like what they do, but you have to respect it. The moment you think you are better than them, smarter than them, can cheat their system, you have lost personal integrity. You also have created a negative energy that will make the semester longer and harder than it has to be.

Tip #5. SCHOOL IS YOUR PRIORITY.

Go to class. Do not let other students influence you to “just get the notes online” or from someone else. Go to every class. This understanding of priorities is a great leap toward the skill set you will need in the professional world. But it will also help your attention span. Because, letā€™s be honest, your attention spans are pretty tiny. How can you adjust? Turn your phone off in the classroomā€”not just on silent. College classes cost money, and your education is an investment. Do not waste it. There is no argument that the social and personal growth that happens in college is important. But it is not more important than your studies. School comes first, everything else is second. And, yes, that includes Netflix.

All best wishes for your future.

Joan McCain is an associate instructor of advertising/public relations in Ā鶹Ō­““ā€™s Nicholson School of Communication. She can be reached at Joan.McCain@ucf.edu.

Then why do so many executives do it incorrectly?

Brainstorming, a conference technique for stimulating ideas and spontaneous discussion, is a science. Thatā€™s proven fact. After years of experimentation and trial, creative thought leaders have learned what works best and what causes the flow of ideas to dry up.

These techniques were brought to my attention as I researched them during my 25-year creative careerĀ  in advertising agencies prior to working in higher education, when even though I was surrounded by people who valued the creative process, and I worked for companies that rewarded it, the way brainstorming was conducted too often brought little valuable results. Fueled in equal parts by a desire to help our output and not waste time in useless meetings, I hit the books to figure out where the process broke down.

Based on that research, and my own experience, I offer three ways to build a better mousetrap to catch your next great idea.

1. Look in other fields

A widget maker looking to do it better has a natural inclination: look at other widget makers. Is that helpful? Maybe. Sometimes. The real pot of gold, though, more likely is in another building altogether. What if a widget maker studied how the Tesla is designed, produced, and marketed? There are so many opportunities to learn about new approaches and tactics by looking in a sector that has nothing to do with your own. The conventional wisdom, as described by creativity expert Roger von Oech, whose books I have read multiple times, is that when we want to learn history, we go to a museum and when we want to see fashion, we go to a boutique. But, he points out, creative people know history can be found in a hardware store and fashion can be found in an airport.

2. Ideas come in solitude

The way to get one really good idea is to get lots of ideas. And what generates the most ideas? When individuals brainstorm alone and in quiet. A creativity seminar exercise called ā€œThe Shifting Gameā€ proves it. Tasked with designing a new kitchen trash can in 20 minutes, groups are separated and given different instructions. Group A brainstorms in the traditional manner, sharing ideas out loud, spontaneously. Group B is told to spend 15 minutes brainstorming by themselves, not speaking, writing ideas as fast as possible on a single sheet of paper. For the last five minutes, they share the best of their lists and record any new ideas that came from sharing or combining. The result? Group B generates more ideasā€”by a ratio of 7 to 1. This is winning the idea lottery.

3. Feedback takes a back seat

Brainstorming environments are delicate ecosystems. They need the right climate so ideas can take root. What kills that ecosystem? Judgment. Evaluation. Negative feedback.

With the goal being quantity of ideas, a free flow has to be nurtured. What stops forward momentum dead in its tracks are those all-too-frequent retorts of, ā€œWe donā€™t have the budget for that,ā€ or ā€œThe boss would never go for that,ā€ or ā€œThatā€™s impossible.Ā ā€ Just as deadly are eye rolls, heavy sighs and suppressed laughs that make contributors feel self-conscious and defensive, and cause them to shut down. What happens next? Crash and burn.

This phase is not about what will work, what is right, what will get approved, what is politically, environmentally or metaphysically correct. It is a time to let your mind wander, roam, allow clashes of ideas to occur, to be funny, to be silly, and to see what happens. Thatā€™s idea fertilizer.

The Take Away

The lesson to businesses and organizations: Brainstorming is not a team sport. Donā€™t call employees into a conference room, give them a pack of Post-it notes, and say, ā€œLetā€™s brainstorm.ā€ That will give you group speak and only the ideas they know you want to hear. Plus, with the first negative comment after an employee is brave enough to offer something that would really get the party started, the momentum shuts down.

Rather, give your team background and instruction. Then send them away to think and make lists alone. Have them send their ideas anonymously to a trusted manager, who compiles them in a broad fashion. Then, let the team come together to evaluate and refine.

Thatā€™s a better mousetrap. And it will catch big, fat results.

Joan McCain is an associate instructor of advertising/public relations in Ā鶹Ō­““ā€™s Nicholson School of Communication. She can be reached at Joan.McCain@ucf.edu.

Today, I teach others how to prepare for this kind of career.

To my students and those I meet in social settings, this sounds glamorous. Rest assured it is not. Yes, itā€™s fun to put words on paper and see them come to life. But the process is tough. Itā€™s hard work. Itā€™s a battle, most often with others who are analytical and uncomfortable with emotion-pushing narrative, yet have authority over your work seeing the light of day.

So frustratingly prominent was this conflict between artist and evaluator in my early career that I sought answers. I read and studied every book I could find on creativity. All of which helped me not only be more creative myself (perhaps because I had validation to trust my instincts), but also to convince those up the proverbial flagpole why the creative process needed to be trusted and respected.

Here are the top lessons I learned about creativity.

Artists are Everywhere

Is creativity a gift bestowed on a chosen few? No. Experience and intelligence are part of it, but the ability to be creative is about having random thought. And every person on the planet is capable of that. The difference is the van Goghs, the Michaelangelos, the Spielbergs paid attention to their random thoughts. They wrote them down and preserved them so they could pay attention to them later. (Steven Spielberg had the idea for the movie ā€œETā€ when he was 9 years old and took it with him to Hollywood.) Artists are comfortable taking an idea and turning it on its head. To be creative, you have to be willing to take that risk.

Quantity Leads to Quality

The only way to get one really good idea is to get lots of ideas. There are no shortcuts. Ad writers will draft 30, 50, 80 headlines to come up with one really great one. At the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, first-year illustration students are given three hours to draw a single apple 100 different ways. The first 10 or 12 drawings are easy: the whole apple, the apple cut in half, upside down, on its side. Then there is that lull. Followed by the result of manipulating random thought, the 87th idea that comes two hours and 37 minutes into the process is so cool and different and genius that both creator and observer exhale in wonder, ā€œWhoa.ā€

Bring Along Your Inner Child

When we were 3, 4 and 5 our imagination ruled. We could be anything and do anything because there were no consequences. Then we went to school and there were expectations and evaluations, and guidelines, and rules. What we learned was conformity. This may be good for society, but it kills creativity. In college I had a friend who was an education major doing her student teaching. She shared a story about her lesson on the moon. She asked the class, ā€œWho knows what makes the tides go up and down?ā€ Eager hands flew up, and she called on one exceptionally jubilant pupil. ā€œI know,ā€ he said. ā€œAll the people in Africa go into the ocean to wash their clothes, and that makes the tide go up. And when they walk out of the ocean that makes the tide go down.ā€ What a brilliant answer. But creative may not be the same as accurate. To turn an idea on its head, you have to think like a child, forgetting the rules and the norms imprinted on us so your brain can wonder.

Find Your Happy Place

In studies of creative people, a characteristic stands out. They laugh. A lot. They have good senses of humor themselves. They also are positive thinkers, finding the good in all situations. To maintain these qualities, it is essential to surround yourself with stimuli that make you laugh, make you happy, and to be optimistic. Debbie Downer is not an artist. Donā€™t be Debbie Downer if you want to find solutions to problems.

Hereā€™s to your next idea being a big idea.

Joan McCain is an associate instructor of advertising/public relations in Ā鶹Ō­““ā€™s Nicholson School of Communication. She can be reached at Joan.McCain@ucf.edu.

I filled close to 40 trash bags, made eight trips to The Salvation Army, and took two loads of petrified chemical substances to the county dump.

And then, there were the photographs. That was the really miserable part. My first child was born in 1995, my second in 1998, and we didnā€™t buy our first digital camera until 2006. (I had done nothing to organize those photos either.) An entire oversized armoire was filled with cardboard boxes marked ā€œRecent Photosā€ (oh, the irony), ā€œScrapbook Memorabiliaā€ (what a joke that was as I had never completed a scrapbook in my life), plus boxes under beds and in closets that had still more envelopes with duplicate prints and negatives.

What all those boxes said to me is that I was a failure as a mother. My children did not have a single organized presentation of anything in their life. Sure, I had hung their baby portraits on the wallā€”for a time. And I bought the school portraits and sent them to the grandparents, but shelved the rest. Visions of those crafty moms with their scissors and colored paper danced before me. And they mocked me.

How did I let my childrenā€™s history get buried under that of everyone elseā€™s? As I dug through the stash of stuff, the chronology became clear. In my matriarchal lineage I am the only woman, descending from a mother and grandmother who were devoted to each other, and their love of dishes, mink stoles, and more framed pieces of needlework than is possible to hang in a ranch-style home.

Somehow, my brothers were not in the line of fire as the possessions were passed down the line. These women died within seven years of each other, and their possessions came to me in two waves. With it, I was bequeathed the title ā€œThe Keeper of Things.ā€

Out of a sense of duty, I felt I had to save it. But I needed none of it, wanted very little, and so it went into the dark recesses of my home. Under beds, in closets, in the attic.

To stay motivated in my purge, I documented each day on Instagram (@joan_in_gratitude) and Facebook, and thanks to the artificial intelligence of social media algorithms, articles began showing up in my news feed. As I read, I learned I was not alone. For the first time in U.S. history, two generations are downsizing at the same time. As aging parents close their family homes, they find many of their baby boomer children donā€™t want the contents of their curio cabinets, breakfronts, or cedar closets.

ā€œMaybe I can sell it,ā€ the octogenarians say, only to find what they have is worth very little, if they can find anyone to buy it at all. The pieces are reproductions, dark and heavy, not at all what furniture dealers or their children want. Hummels and Thomas Kinkade paintings have no appeal to them since they are on the brink of downsizing themselves.

As I shared my purge, reactions from my friends ran the spectrum. Some were inspired and started their own purges. Others were horrified. ā€œYouā€™re going to regret this,ā€ posted a friend beneath my photo of about 200 color slides of my 1985 trip to coastal California. I replied, ā€œI havenā€™t looked at these in 32 years. I donā€™t even know whatā€™s on them.ā€ (Photos will forever be clutter to me. I take very few and delete most of them so they donā€™t build up.

After countless hours sorting through every duplicate print, sitting next to a trash can, I got my childrenā€™s photos culled down to two small plastic boxes. I have scanned the good prints, folded in the digital, and I spend a few hours each weekend making progress with online photo books of the highlights of their lives to print and give to them. I hope to be done by the time my oldest graduates from college in May.

It has been more than a month since I purged my closets and cabinets. My house looks the same, because these things were not displayed. But it feels lighter. Or perhaps it is my psyche.

No longer burdened as The Keeper of Things for two previous generations, I am now free to live a future of my own imagining. To have more with less.

Joan McCain is an associate instructor of advertising/public relations in Ā鶹Ō­““ā€™s Nicholson School of Communication. She can be reached at Joan.McCain@ucf.edu.

By the time heā€™d graduated high school, he had already climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and trekked through Machu Picchu. At 14, he appeared on Oprah. After earning his diploma this week, heā€™ll be focusing on developing a nonprofit to get kids active in the outdoors.

Coon is ambitious, and his spirit is infectious, especially considering that at the age of 5, a hard-fought battle with Bilateral Sporadic Retinoblastoma, a rare form of eye cancer, cost him his left eye. By age 6, both eyes had to be removed.

ā€œBeing blind, there are always obstacles, and Iā€™m forced to think creatively about getting around them,ā€ said Coon, an interpersonal-organizational communication major who will be among the more than 7,800 students graduating from Ā鶹Ō­““ this week.

ā€œMy parents have always treated me like a normal kid, and thatā€™s what I really needed. But nobodyā€™s omniscient. Itā€™s up to me to educate people about myself and my history. Flexible, open communication and honesty would help all of our lives go a lot smoother.ā€

As a kid, Coon went through a time when he felt sorry for himself. Then he heard the story of Erik Weihenmayer, a world-class athlete who didnā€™t let his blindness hinder his ambitions. Weihenmayer is the only blind person to have reached the summit of Mount Everest and the tallest peak on each continent, known as the Seven Summits.

The two connected in Jacksonville– Coonā€™s hometownā€” through a family friend, and the meeting set Coon forth on his athletic career.Ā  Coon even appeared as a surprise guest on Oprah Winfreyā€™s show to read Weihenmayer a letter he wrote about Weihenmayerā€™s invaluable inspiration.

ā€œHe encouraged me that I could do absolutely anything I wanted to do,ā€ said Coon.

Coon took up competitive rock climbing and then moved on to downhill skiing and long-distance backpacking. By high school, he had gotten into wrestling, and he competed as a varsity player all four years.

By the end of high school, Coon had traveled around the world with Team Sight Unseen, a blind, visually-impaired and sighted mountaineering team he and his friends created after a 2006 expedition along the Ancascocha Trail into Machu Picchu led by Weihenmayer.

ā€œTogether, we found the courage and inspiration to tell people you can break through any barrier if youā€™re willing to put in the hard work,ā€ said Coon.

When it came time for college, Coon considered a few other universities, but he chose Ā鶹Ō­““ because he felt welcomed by the wrestling team and the Ā鶹Ō­““ community. Since he has traveled so much, he said the transition to full-on college independence was a breeze. And Tyrone, his Seeing Eye dog, was a huge help in navigating campus.

Coon was a member of Ā鶹Ō­““ā€™s wrestling team for about a year and a half before he left to focus on teaching fitness. Heā€™s been a spinning instructor at Ā鶹Ō­““ā€™s Recreation and Wellness Center ever since, where heā€™s known for creating a vivid image of the outdoors and channeling a mountain bike ride during his classes.

Ā鶹Ō­““ Instructor Joan McCain first met Coon in ā€œPrinciples of Advertising,ā€ which she taught last summer. For the final assignment, students were asked to create a print ad that visually exemplifies who they are. For Coon, McCain adjusted the task to writing an elevator speech, a 30-second pitch about who he is and why others should support him.

ā€œI was grading assignments, and when I got to his, I honest to goodness screamed a little. At the end of his speech, Kyle wrote ā€˜Cancer took my sight, blindness gave me vision, the mountains let me live,ā€™ā€ said McCain, who is now working with Coon on his memoir. ā€œAs a professor, the hardest thing for me to remember is that he is blind, because he makes it so easy to treat him like any other student Iā€™ve ever met. He comes across as a person who can do anything.ā€

Inspired by Coonā€™s story and his enthusiasm for telling it, McCain assembled a group of advertising-public relations students to help Coon develop his public speaking career as part of a semester-long interdisciplinary study project. The students established a social media presence for Coon and assisted him with branding materials for Sight Unseen, Inc., a nonprofit organization heā€™s creating to get people off the couch and into the outdoors.

Coon will return to Ā鶹Ō­““ this fall to pursue a graduate certificate in nonprofit management to help him lead Sight Unseen, Inc.

Heā€™s filed for 501(c)(3), or federally recognized nonprofit status, and he hopes to achieve that within the next year. From there, he wants to expose people to the clarity and self-awareness that the outdoors gave him.

In the meantime, Coon will continue to spin, climb, backpack and seek opportunities to tell his story.

ā€œIf my experience can help people realize their limitations are far fewer than they imagined, then Iā€™ll keep telling my story,ā€ Coon said. ā€œI want everyone to be able to live a life without limits.ā€

The Multiā€cultural Advertising Internship Program (MAIP), recruits and places students of color in national advertising agencies each summer. MAIP interns are flown to each host city, then to New York City for graduation, provided housing and paid $4,000 for the 10ā€week internship.

Each summer, MAIP places about 130 interns from a pool of nearly 400 applicants.

Between 2005 and 2009, 10 Ā鶹Ō­““ students majoring in Advertisingā€Public Relations were selected for this competitive national internship program sponsored by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As).

With promotion and consistent recruiting by Adā€PR Instructor Joan McCain, Ā鶹Ō­““ Adā€PR majors broke records for MAIP participation. In December 2009, a record 14 students applied. In February nine students were notified that they were semiā€finalists and would be granted an interview to determine if they are a MAIP finalist. This was the second record breaking news. By April, all nine students were offered positions ā€” a Ā鶹Ō­““ sweep. One student did decline the offer because it did not match his career goals.

A Ā鶹Ō­““ student was offered the only internship in public relations in the country, and another student secured the highly competitive creative position of copywriter. Three students will spend their summer in New York City; three will be in Chicago, one in Dearborn, Mich., and one in Los Angeles.

The students began their internship on June 7, and will all meet in New York City at MAIP headquarters for a graduation ceremony on Aug. 12.

“MAIP offers the students an incredibly opportunity,” said McCain. “It will truly open doors for their professional futures. But it also enhances the reputation of Ā鶹Ō­““. These students will stand up at graduation ā€” among other MAIP interns from older universities with larger programs ā€” and say, ‘I am from the Ā鶹Ō­““.’ After hearing it eight times, those advertising professionals in the room will definitely know who we are ā€” and how wonderful our students are.”

2010 MAIP Intern Placements:

McCain is already recruiting for next year’s pool of MAIP applicants.