Two University of Oklahoma journalism and mass communication students will travel to Bangladesh over the winter break to help train Bangladeshi journalists.

The students, Alexandria Page and Hailey Branson, will work alongside Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication faculty Jan. 4-11, 2010, in Dhaka. The faculty and students will train young video journalists from South Asia as part of a U.S. State Department training program run by OU's Gaylord College.

Gaylord College launched a search Sept. 28 hoping to find even one student eager to travel 12 time zones around the world to help train young South Asian journalists. Two students were chosen: Page and Branson.

Page of Keller, Texas, graduated from OU in 2009 with a bachelor of arts in journalism and is now a graduate student in the Gaylord College. During her undergraduate career, Page hosted the Gaylord College's weekly sports show, OUr Sports Pad, and worked on the award-winning nightly newscast, OU Nightly.

Branson, of Perry, is a journalism senior and will graduate in 2010. Branson writes for the campus newspaper, The Oklahoma Daily, serves as a Gaylord Ambassador and is a McMahon Scholar within the Gaylord College.

"We take for granted that our students feel at ease working on different media platforms and can shoot, edit, and write as well as report," Gaylord College dean and project co-director Joe Foote said. "This is not the case in South Asia where television news reporters usually have a narrow range of responsibility. Alex and Hailey will set a great example and empower a generation of women there to build broader skill sets and assume greater degrees of leadership."

Page and Branson will travel with four veteran journalists: Ken Fischer, broadcast journalism professor; Elanie Steyn, journalism professor; Bob Dickey, news director for OU Nightly; and veteran CNN and NBC foreign correspondent Mike Boettcher, who is serving as a visiting professor at Gaylord College for the 2009-2010 academic year.

"We picked some outstanding students to join us in South Asia. This is not going to be a pleasure cruise," said Ken Fischer, Bangladesh workshop director. "While there may be some time to see the sights, we'll be busy the entire trip. The students will be working on their own stories while also assisting the faculty with the workshop. I'm sure both the international journalists and the Gaylord students will benefit from the experience. This will be my third trip to Bangladesh and I always come back hoping the journalists learned as much from me as I did from the experience."

The group will leave for Dhaka, Bangladesh, in early January to do two simultaneous workshops -- one on visual storytelling and the other on women's leadership in media.

The workshops are part of a six-year project at OU funded by the Citizen Exchange Program of the U.S. State Department. Nearly 200 South Asian journalists have been trained in Norman and their home countries. The current project includes journalists from Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan.

Each student will also have an opportunity to do a video project of her own while there and will use new tools to report back to Oklahoma.