When Vladimir Avina joined the New Mexico State University College of Engineering as a student intern in 2019, he was given responsibility for a nearly non-existent online media program. Now, a senior media specialist, Avina’s work has been awarded four Telly Awards, a global competition honoring “the best work in the video medium in an exciting new era of the moving image on and offline.”
Avina, and student media interns, Abigail Salas and Nathaniel Bitting, created a five-part series “Engineering Stories” that received the following Telly awards:
- Silver Winner: Documentary — Online
- Bronze Winner: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — Online
- Silver Winner: Education and Discovery — Online
- Silver Winner: Science and Technology — Online
“When Vlad was hired as a student, he worked on our only social media outlet Facebook. It was poorly maintained,” said Linda Fresques, college chief of staff. “Vlad, we soon discovered, excelled at working with social media and had other talents, including photography, video and writing. And now, he’s training the next generation.”
“Vladimir took our media program to an entirely new level and expanded it across multiple platforms, which is essential to reach our audiences. His work is extremely valuable to our mission,” said former College of Engineering dean and current interim NMSU Provost Lakshmi N. Reddi.
While serving as dean, Avina noted, Reddi stressed the fact engineering is a people-serving field and students from all backgrounds and circumstances can be successful in this field.
“We just had to do a better job and communicating that engineering students come from all backgrounds, whether they did dance, music or cheer their whole lives or if they always knew they wanted to do something with science,” Avina said.
“Winning the Telly award means a lot to me; we work super hard to make these videos great for the students and for the college as a whole and getting an award like this is a big accomplishment. I am super proud of the work that we have done and seeing it win against big names is super cool,” Salas said. “As a journalism major, I think the classes I have taken have definitely helped me to improve my editing. But working here has helped me to elevate my editing to another level. The skills I have learned both here and in class have helped me to produce award-winning edits.”
Salas, along with fellow students Noah Apodaca, Cera Moots, Chris Hernandez and Cristian Crosse, recently won a New Mexico Broadcasting Award for “Best Collegiate Newscast: NMSU News 22.”
“Every day I have the pleasure of talking with our engineering students and getting to share their unique stories with our community and the world. I love working with college students because they are the most inspired demographic. It’s because of them my job doesn’t feel like work. I’m proud of my team, especially our journalism students, because I’ve seen them grow and become these media professionals who are admired by their peers,” Avina said. “I’m also thankful to work with such an outstanding group of people in the College of Engineering, they make it easy to create meaningful stories and videos.”
The College of Engineering entries were among 12,000 globally from six continents and all 50 states. Fellow competitors are among the biggest names in the field.
More information about the Telly Awards can be found at https://www.tellyawards.com/about/about/.
