How Telenovelas Cured My Senioritis

While senioritis is a fictional concept, the term captures the idea of a very strong sentiment. I have generally enjoyed school from the time I was a little kid. Still, January was dark, cold and slow as I dragged myself back into one last semester of being a student.

However, I think taking telenovelas my last semester of college was one of the best decisions I ever made. 

Why? Telenovelas provided the cure to my senioritis.

Coming into this class, I assumed telenovelas would be a more interesting topic of study. Thinking about courses you have to take in college like statistics and history, telenovelas doesn’t have a ton of competition for being the most exciting. I assumed I would learn a lot about telenovelas and how they affect general populations, mostly in countries like Mexico or Colombia. 

What I did not expect to learn in this class was how authors are using these love stories to dare to conquer topics like domestic abuse, drug cartels and classism. I quickly was much more intrigued in the realistic telenovelas that used a traditional form of media to reach huge audiences and convey messages that were not only relevant, but important.

Domestic Abuse in Turkish Drama, Sen Anlat Karadeniz

Studying telenovelas became especially engaging as the semester progressed because the topic is more specific than a lot of college courses. I enjoy learning about all aspects of telenovelas. Starting with a broad What exactly is a telenovela? of course, but also learning about all these more detailed aspects like ratings and premiere parties and how globalization affected telenovela remakes. Most of the topics I enjoyed were details of media I wouldn’t have even thought about.

Learning about the material became interesting to me for more than a grade. I wasn’t learning this material for a test; I was truly asking questions because I was curious how things worked - a luxury in a college course, believe me. Even writing blog posts was a nice change of pace. In Grady, we often do not get the chance to write with a strong voice of our own as much as we would like. This class provided a nice opportunity to take a more creative writing approach to a topic most would consider outside the box already.

Even with Coronavirus cutting our semester short, I enjoyed learning about different cultures before I entered into the “real world” post college. I especially liked learning about Turkish dramas and how different something as simple as television changes so much when you change countries. Turkish dramas provided me with a cool snapshot into a culture I previously knew nothing about.

We are Gen Z tech babies. If there is one aspect of life we have a strong general understanding of, it is media. Telenovelas worked as a bridge to help us understand other cultures in the context of something we already, almost innately, understand. 

We, as students, had a chance to take an interesting topic and look at it from all angles to help us understand a culture different from us in a context we could understand. That is not something you can say you leave a lot of college courses with. I walked into this semester thinking I had learned what I needed to learn about PR and just needed to power through one more semester to get my very expensive piece of paper. Telenovelas changed this. There is a lot that can be learned in unexpected places and through different lenses of stories - yes, even love stories.