Segue Interview

Here is the video version of the Segue interview in which I was asked to answer a number of questions about my life and future plans:

I hope you will enjoy it.

Here is the link to the article of the series published in The Edwardsville Intelligencer:

Romero’s Curiosity Rooted In Undersea World

This Sunday the radio show on which the article was based was aired by WSIE.
This will be my last Segue show. In this case the tables were turned and I was the interviewee with the host being Tom Atwood, Instructor of Broadcast Journalism in the Department of Mass Communications.

It was a great pleasure for me having created and developed this radio show whose first broadcast took place on March 6, 2011. Since then 200 shows have been aired, one every week, without missing a single week and without ever rerunning a single show, something that is quite unusual –you can even say unheard of- in the world of broadcasting. More than 200 guests were interviewed including SIUE faculty, staff, students, and alumni as well as non-SIUE scholars who came to the SIUE campus for a variety of reasons, including a Nobel Prize laureate. Interviewees included people from five continents and some shows were done outside the studio setting taking the microphones and cameras to places as distant as Joplin, Missouri, where a SIUE geography class was being conducted.

During these 200 weeks I had the great fortune of working with superb professionals all of whom you can see in the picture at:

Photos

The picture was taken during the reception I offered to all of them after recording show #200 (Tom Atwood is missing from the picture since he had to leave before we found a photographer –our colleague Elza Ibroscheva- for the occasion).

I was also very proud that the music for the show was composed and performed by my late father, Aldemaro Romero Sr.
You can listen to all of the shows at:

CASsegue

Most of them can also be watched since we incorporated a webcam to the interviews -or were recorded in the Mass Communications TV studio- about 120 shows ago.

The University Library is now preserving all of these radio shows, videos, and articles in a special collection as materials for the history of the university.
To have written, produced, and hosted all these shows was one of my best experiences at SIUE because they allowed me to get to know a lot of people of the campus community much more in depth while reaching to the world with great stories from academia.

Now I will embark in new outreach ventures that include, but are not limited to, a new radio production, “College Talk,” to be nationally syndicated, a new nationally syndicated newspaper column, “Letters from Academia,” and a video blog “The Romero Report.” Beginning at the end of January all of these weekly productions about current higher education issues can be accessed through my personal website at http://www.aromerojr.net. I am also finishing a book titled “Institutional Failure in Higher Education,” a study about the effects of bad leadership and management on colleges and universities -using real examples- and what can be done to make of postsecondary institutions better places. The book is coauthored with my colleague John Pratte, Dean of the College of Science and Mathematics at Arkansas State University.
Thus, I want to say good-bye to all of my followers in Segue in the same form I signed off every one of my 200 shows: “Stay tuned.”

Al Romero