One ISU student can add another award to his resume — a resume which already includes an Emmy and numerous other honors.

Jeff Christian, sophomore in pre-journalism and mass communication, flew to New York City last week to accept the national Edward R. Murrow Award for a story he shot while working as a photographer at KCCI Channel 8, Des Moines’ CBS affiliate.

Christian and KCCI reporter Eric Hanson have already won numerous awards, including a regional Emmy, for their story about a garage band of senior citizen banjo and fiddle players, but the trip to the award ceremony in New York put them within feet of media legends like CBS’ Dan Rather and Mike Wallace.

“Eric and I just felt like we’d slipped ourselves into our dads’ suits and were running into walls,” said Christian, who is also the projects coordinator and a photographer for the Daily. “I was one of the youngest people there.”

Hanson said it was surreal to look around the room and recognize so many faces from television.

“There were all of these people we’ve seen on TV growing up and we were right there in the same room getting some of the same awards they were,” Hanson said. “Jeff and I kept looking at each other, smiling, and thinking, ‘Wow, we’re not watching this from the outside.'”

Dave Busiek, news director for KCCI Channel 8, said Hanson and Christian acted as a team — Christian shot the video footage while Hanson wrote the story.

“It’s highly unusual for someone so young to win a national Murrow Award,” Busiek said.

“It’s a testament to Jeff and Eric’s ability to work together and put together a story that people make an emotional connection with.”

Christian said the story was powerful because it was about average people doing something unusual — transforming a garage from an auto shop during the day into a practice studio at night.

“It’s not so much what we did, it was just giving them an outlet to show their talents,” Christian said. “In this business you run into some fascinating characters. They were like your grandma or grandpa playing the banjo, and that cracks me up.”

After working at KCCI , Christian now does freelance work to focus on getting through college.

Christian taught his colleagues a lot about photojournalism on the way, said KCCI photographer Cortney Kintzer, who Christian considers his mentor.

“Jeff has far surpassed anything that I could ever teach him. He puts me to shame,” Kintzer said.

“I’ll go out on stories now and think, ‘How would Jeff shoot this?’ He would get shots I’d never dreamed of.”