Student Profile: Ethan Wentzlaff

By: Daniel Lee

Photo Credit: Ethan Wentzlaff

Ethan Wentzlaff, a senior at UMBC didn’t go down the traditional path of a 4 year plan. He originally wasn’t even planning to pursue MCS or even graduate at UMBC. Ethan wanted to see where baseball would take him since he played summer ball during his high school days. While he did decide to start with UMBC, he and his coach had a long conversation about whether UMBC really was the best place to continue his baseball career. After much deliberation, he decided to move to Salisbury University.

However, Ethan already ran into issues with the end goal of his undergraduate degree. Before he switched, He was already having second thoughts on the typical path of a student athlete. He was recommended to go with Business Technology Administration (BTA) from his first advisor. As Ethan progressed further into the degree and started taking IS courses, he realized that his patience for IS and inflexibility of the courses he took didn’t interest him at all.  It didn’t seem right to sit behind and let the programming do the work. In the end, he decided to go with MCS as his teammates were positive about their switch into the major. But, his time was limited and he began his transfer.

So Ethan went on to Salisbury to commit to the dream he built for himself before entering adulthood. The path seemed clear and Ethan was ecstatic about the team he joined and the athlete. Life seemed to have other plans though and the way forward went awry. For one, Covid-19 put a halt to everything. No more collegiate championship chances. No more practices or games. Not even a normal college education could happen when a worldwide pandemic stopped everything in its tracks. It all seemed to fall apart. However, there’s a silver lining with these events. Academically, things weren’t looking too great. Not because Ethan couldn’t perform well, but because of how much he would have to do. There was no MCS equivalent at Salisbury and the university wanted him to take their version of core classes and electives. On top of having to take every class online over Zoom, the least ideal situation to earn an education, there just wasn’t any comfortable position for Ethan. He didn’t have an infinite amount of money or time to take as many classes as needed and the reason he even transferred became irrelevant. Again, he had to make a tough decision, but he settled on transferring back to UMBC to complete his undergraduate degree and this time, with MCS.

Although Ethan made the best decision for him academically and financially, he still missed the athlete's life. He missed his team and his coach that he shared many memories with and it was a passion he pursued ever since high school. Without hesitation, he began to find ways to hold onto the sports life. He ended up finding an internship directly at UMBC with the UMBC sports soccer broadcast. It gave him the opportunity to feel what it’s like to be hands-on with media production and managing what slides and videos were shown on screen to a live audience.  He then continued on to do the same for basketball. After all these experiences, Ethan was able to move up from interning to working for the university in sports broadcasting and production for the year, bringing all his experiences with sports and media together.  

When it comes to the MCS program, there are two classes that stood out to Ethan the most. MCS 399: Methods in Media and Communication Studies and MCS 377: Making Visual Culture. MCS 399 was the class that opened his eyes to the importance and nuance of the research process. High school didn’t exactly prepare him on what the true research process would look like or what strategies there were to finding information you needed. MCS 377 on the other hand is how he was able to finally interact and participate in content creation. Since he focused on pushing his baseball aspirations in his early college career, he didn’t exactly have the time or energy to emulate what he saw on social media. The skills he learned and valued the most throughout his time with the major is the ability to use the Adobe Creative Cloud. By putting himself out there, he was able to contribute in ways he couldn’t imagine himself doing. It also let him take on side projects for friends and family whenever they needed a good photo or opinions on how to present their work better. With his time at UMBC coming to a close, Ethan Wentzlaff is looking to end it with his original aspirations still held close since the beginning, albeit in a different form.