Creating Credible Connections

Professor of Multimedia Communications Lisa Carponelli has a reputation for keeping it real with her students. Coming to Simpson in 2008 after gaining prominence as a television news anchor, she has a passion for preparing students to become authentic and creative video story tellers.

Her students learn by doing, most frequently leveraging the simple recording capabilities available on their smart phones.

“I usually have students out filming a bit during class time, and then our classroom becomes a large editing suite, where everyone is at a desktop with headphones editing their footage. There’s a lot of collaboration and creative ideas zipping around the room — it’s a blast.”

Carponelli’s students corroborate her claims.

“She offers lots of hands-on help and in-class activities to make certain we completely understand what we’re learning,” said Aaron Wilkins ’25. “She teaches us to always revise our work to make it better and better until we reach perfection.”

“Professor Carponelli relates everything we do in class to real life outside of college,” said Maddie Hays ’25. “This makes it easy for her to push us toward our goals because we are able to take the skills we are learning and use them outside the classroom setting.”

One of Carponelli’s mentees, Sophie Reese ’23, is a news producer for WHO-TV in Des Moines. She says Carponelli put her on the right path from the get-go, creating an ideal environment for learning from day one of the very first class she took from her.

“The energy she brought to the classroom was unlike any other professor I had,” said Reese. “She was kind, yet tough when she needed to be — she wasn’t afraid to call it how it is, which I admire. From Comm 101 to my senior capstone, she was a big part in preparing me for the real world.”

And, as fate would have it, Reese and Carponelli are now on the same team at WHO-TV. While Carponelli continues to teach at Simpson, she is returning to life on-air as a part-time weekend news anchor at WHO-TV.

“It’s pretty incredible to realize that my former students will now be my colleagues,” said Carponelli. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”