Full Sail University

Just Launched: Taylor Schaub

In Just Launched, we talk to brand new Full Sail grads, right out the door from graduation, about what’s next for them as they head out into the workforce. Our latest Just Launched graduate is Taylor Schaub.

Just Launched: Taylor Schaub - Hero image

Name: Taylor Schaub

Degree Program: Sportscasting

Graduation Date: October 04, 2019

Why Sportscasting: Both my parents worked in broadcast news. I grew up around all of this. I grew up around television. My dad was a reporter locally in San Francisco for CBS, my mom a producer for ABC in San Francisco. Ever since I can remember, I grew up around television. I grew up around breaking news and storytelling and it always appealed to me. I always wanted to be in front of a camera. I always wanted to tell stories. I could never envision myself having a 9-to-5 job, sitting in some corner office somewhere. To me, I had to be out, I had to do something different every day. As I got older, and I was trying to carve my own path into this industry, I realized that sports were going to be the way to go. My first opportunities came in sports, and I just loved it. I loved the fact that sports could bring people together.

Thoughts on Full Sail University’s Dan Patrick School of Sportscasting: I will 100% say without a shadow of a doubt that if you want to be a sportscaster, and you want to learn every skill that it takes – I am talking on camera, off camera, writing, editing, shooting, learning stuff that you wouldn't even have thought you needed to learn – the Dan Patrick School is the best place for you to go because it is going to put you hands-on inside the studio and out in the field in a way that you're just not going to get anywhere else.

Short-Term Goals: My short-term goal is to take what I've learned here, take the base, and then really go apply it in a place where I can get the necessary repetitions, because the Dan Patrick School of Sportscasting sets the foundation for the type of sportscaster that you can be, but you still need to go out there and get, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, your 10,000 hours.

Most Challenging Story You’ve Done so Far: I went out and covered President Trump's announcement that he was going to run for office for the second term and I went out there by myself. I had never covered politics. I had never covered anything. The closest thing I covered to that was like a UCF football game, but I felt like it was important for me to get that type of experience and be in that type of atmosphere.

And it was right after Gordie Hershiser’s class where he taught us how to do live shots and learn how to be in a moment that's not always going to be scripted and go your way. I was out there shooting my own stand-ups, I was doing live shots, I was describing the action, I was saying what was going on. I mean, I was in a very divisive moment at one point where there were Trump supporters on one side of the street and there were protesters on the other, and about 15 or so biker cops right in the middle of the street, and they were yelling things back and forth at each other.

It’s raining, it’s terrible weather, it’s hectic out…it’s so chaotic and I am doing a live shot, standing there, and, all of a sudden, some guy comes up and starts hugging me and tries to take the microphone away from me and cusses on it. I come home that night, I send the video to Gordie, he loves it, and the next day I walk in the office, and everybody's just huddling around the computer watching the video. Now he uses it as an example in his class of “Hey, I'm telling you guys this is all going to happen. Well guess what? Taylor went out three days after I told him, and the exact thing happened.”

Advice to Students: You have to be open to anything. Anything and everything and take advantage of every opportunity. But the advice that I truly give to anybody that wants to come here, and it's the one piece of advice that especially I think rings true for parents, know that this is college, but it's also a job. It's not a job in a bad sense. It's a job in a good sense. Meaning that you are coming here to learn how to work. You are coming here to learn how to be successful in any job that you get outside of the Dan Patrick School of Sportscasting. The Dan Patrick school is truly real-world education. That you are coming here, and you are doing what somebody in Jacksonville on the local news is doing. You are actually doing the job, it's just in the educational setting, and that's what really sets us apart from a normal school.