Montana made; NYU film student from Helena seeks support for latest project

Brooke Swaney was going to do something “practical” but it just didn’t work out.

A Helenan and longtime Grandstreet student, Swaney graduated in 2003 from Stanford University with a major in psychology and a minor in French. She even wrote an honors thesis on media effects on health beliefs in American Indians, which will be published in the prestigous Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

But halfway through her time at Stanford, Swaney realized that she wasn’t doing what she wanted to be doing.

If you know her, you know that Swaney is, well, kind of a goofball. Though psychology may have satisfied her intellectual side, in terms of creativity, it just wasn’t cutting it.

At school, Swaney participated in Stanford’s annual student musical revue “Gaieties” as a freshman and a senior, but didn’t have much time to devote to the arts otherwise.

To give herself another creative outlet, she decided to take a writing class, where she came up with what she thought was a really great idea for a story. But the more she thought about it, the more Swaney felt the idea was more conducive to a different medium — film.

By EMILY DONAHOE, IR Staff Writer

Full Story: http://helenair.com/articles/2006/07/12/yourtime/01yt20060706161.txt