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August 24, 2007 > News > Prilop named Director of Student Publications

Prilop named Director of Student Publications

By Lily Chun | Thresher Editorial Staff

Student Media Adviser Jen Cooper (Will Rice ‘90), adviser of student publications including the Rice Thresher and Campanile for the past 10 years, left this June to become Director of Marketing at Kicks Indoor Soccer. This fall, Valerie Prilop takes her place but with a new title: Director of Student Publications. Prilop will oversee the journalistic and budgetary concerns of various student media like the Thresher and Campanile as well as publications like “Beyond the Hedges.”

Prilop comes to Rice having spent the last five years advising student media at Brazosport High School in Freeport after spending a year at Lamar High School in Houston.

Prilop’s journalistic experience began in high school, when she was the yearbook editor in chief of Columbia High School in West Columbia, Texas. In college and graduate school, Prilop was on the newspaper staff. She graduated from University of St. Thomas.

After college, Prilop worked at the Houston Chronicle from 1997-‘99 putting together different multimedia — video, audio, photos — for the newspaper. She said the project she spent most of her time on was Virtual Voyager, an exclusively online media.

“This was in the late ’90s when that stuff was getting really popular,” Prilop said. “In college, my degree was communications with an emphasis on broadcast journalism. So when I went to the Chronicle, I actually helped train them in video production and taught mini-classes.”

Following her stint at the Chronicle, Prilop went back to graduate school at the University of New Mexico to pursue another interest: anthropology.

“I was interested in pursuing my education in school,” she said. “I liked school. I liked being in school. I was really interested in anthropology and the [undergraduate] university I went to didn’t have that degree.”

Prilop said that she wanted to be a professor but needed a break and did not want to attend more school after receiving her Master’s degree in anthropology.

“The natural thing I could do was teach,” she said. “I was qualified to teach journalism. so I came back home, and I got a job teaching journalism, and that was in 2001. I’m still basically doing it.”

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