Pace’s Media, Communications, and Visual Arts (MVCA) department hosted a Student Showcase in Wilcox’s Multipurpose Room, in order to give students recognition for work they have produced in their media classes, April 20.

Pieces were taken from varies MCVA classes including; Writing for Print Media, Ethics Morality and the Media, Sports Media, Feature Writing, Global Newsroom, Effective Speaking for Industry Professionals, Directing, Media 1, Editing 1, Art of the Moving Cameras, Grad field production, and Audio Storytelling, as well as The Pace Chronicle.

Students could vote on what they considered the best piece from a “fiction” and “non-fiction” category, and the winners received a $25 gift card.

The winning piece for the non-fiction category was a speech titled Peace Surpassing Faith by graduate student Jaye Betancourt, which is about his mother’s struggle with cancer, and to give others with similar situations hope.

“[My mother] sat me down and after telling me that she loved me very much, said that she received good news from the doctor today. ‘Good news from the doctor!’ I was excited yet curious as to what the good news could be. Wait a second; I know this woman isn’t pregnant? Little did I know the next words to come out of her mouth would be: ‘The reason why it’s good news is because they found a growth in my spine. They believe that this is cancer and it is small enough to take out without the risk of spreading’,” the beginning of Peace Surpassing Faith read.

Betancourt created his speech during his Effective Speaking for Industry Professionals class, after being inspired by his classmate Sarah West’s documentary, where she revealed had she Chrome’s Disease and her younger brother had Down Syndrome.

“I was moved in the class. I was like ‘does anyone else feel like they’re about to cry’. Then this assignment came, and they said ‘interview’ and then [I didn’t know who interview], so I went back to Sarah, who was in that class as well, and decided to do it about my mom,” Betancourt said.

Betancourt’s mother survived and was amazed by her son’s speech.

“She’s alive, I sent her the footage of when I did it for class, and she was just like ‘woo’,” Betancourt said.

The winning piece for the non-fiction category was a film called Concealing Consent created for the Art of the Moving Camera class. The film is a parody of The Shining by Stanley Kubrick based around the producers struggles to secure a filming location.

“There’s a part in The Shining where there’s a little kid on a tricycle going through all these hallways. We wanted to film at a certain point on campus, but we ran into a lot of trouble with people and administration. We thought it was such a little thing and they made it into such a big deal. This project was kind of just laughing at the whole situation we were involved in,” Concealing Consent’s producers Daniel Kaljaj said.