Joe Wicklund

Joe Wicklund, who is currently an Admissions Counselor and baseball coach here at CSS, is a 2000 graduate of the Communications Department. Before taking his position here as an Admissions Counselor, he played two years of professional baseball for the Tyler Roughnecks, wrote for the Daily Telegram, and did grant and proposal writing, in addition to being a freelance writer for all three of the newspapers in the area.

One of Joe's favorite classes was Feature Writing with John Baggs. He liked the course because it explored the world outside of straight news and it felt more like you were telling a story. Joe also liked Newswriting and Reporting because it was a helpful course to have to compliment feature writing. He also enjoyed Rhetoric with John Schifsky because he enjoyed how the course tore apart written language and emphasized the power of the written word.

Writing for The Cable made up a great deal of Joe's college career-in fact one of the reasons he chose CSS was because he knew that he would have the opportunity to write for The Cable and thus develop his writing skills. As a junior Joe was the sports editor and as a senior he was the editor-in-chief. One of the things he loved best about The Cable was that it gave him the opportunity to impact the CSS community. And impact it he did. When Joe was on the newspaper staff there wasn't enough copies to go around. The newspaper staff would regularly have to deal with numerous angry people on Fridays by noon. Part of that was because The Cable was truly, as Joe says, the voice of the students at that time. The other part was because of the weekly Jim and Joe articles. Jim and Joe stretched their limits with the column throughout the time it was in circulation and one article even featured Larry Goodwin as a "swimsuit model."

Unsurprisingly, Joe was also highly active (he was a two time team captain) in the baseball program at CSS. He considers it to be one of his most important and memorable experiences at the college.

Ed Smith, Steve Erickson, John Baggs, and John Schifsky were Joe's favorite professors during his years at CSS. He loved all of them because they are passionate about what they are teaching and they are great at getting students involved. Joe says that one of his most memorable and unique experiences at CSS was that he was lucky enough to write alongside and take classes with Ryan Vine, whom he looked up to as a writer. Ryan, who is also a CSS alumna, is currently a faculty member for the English department.