Story by Riley Palshaw
Photo courtesy of Morgan Williams
Growing up in Columbia, Mizzou alum Morgan Williams never questioned where she would go to college. With Mizzou practically in her backyard, a brother who spent four years as Truman the Tiger and a growing interest in journalism, the University of Missouri was the obvious choice.
“It didn’t really make sense for me to even look anywhere else,” she said.
As a student, Williams found her own way to become part of the Mizzou community. She spent four years photographing, filming and creating content for Mizzou Cheer and Mizzou’s mascot Truman the Tiger, combining her longtime interest in photography with a world she had grown up around through her mother, a cheer coach.
That experience gave her a place to use her camera for storytelling, but it was a documentary class through the Honors College that pushed those interests further. When Williams enrolled in one of Bill Horner’s courses, she thought she was signing up for a film studies class.
“We were sitting together waiting for the professor to come in talking about this film studies class and he gets in and he’s like, ‘OK, so are you guys ready to film a documentary this semester?’” Williams said. “I think everyone in the class kind of looked at each other and we were like, ‘I don’t think we’re in the right class.’”
The documentary focused on how journalists and journalism are portrayed in popular culture and what those portrayals mean for the public’s perception of journalism. What Williams expected to be a simple class became a four-semester project she chose to keep returning to.
Williams helped research, conduct interviews and operate the camera as the project took students beyond Columbia to Boston, Los Angeles and New York. The class examined films including “All the President’s Men,” “Spotlight,” “The Post” and “Shock and Awe,” interviewing journalists, filmmakers and Mizzou alumni along the way.
Horner said Williams was one of the students most deeply invested in the project.
“Morgan was right at the front of the pack because she was really bought in completely and was dedicated to it,” said Horner. “What I like about this class is it’s a real concrete way to bring a lot of different skills together in doing a project.”
For Williams, the documentary became more than an assignment. Each semester gave her another opportunity to build on the work from the one before, and she did not want to stop before seeing the finished product.
“It became a bit of a passion project for me,” she said. “I wanted to see it through and see how everything came together.”
The experience, she said, was representative of what made her Mizzou education so valuable.
“It just goes to show how impressive and how important the Missouri Method is,” said Williams. “The experiences that I got through the J-School and the experiences that I got through filming this documentary with Professor Horner, I really can’t imagine having that at any other school.”
Now, two years after graduating in May 2024, Williams is still finding ways to stay connected to campus. She continues to contribute to Mizzou Cheer through photography and content creation, returning to the sidelines where she first found a way to combine her interests with her Mizzou community.
Today, Williams and her fiancé, a former Truman the Tiger, live in Columbia, where she works as a recruiter for MFA Oil. Her journalism background continues to help her communicate and connect with people in her career, just as her experiences at Mizzou prepared her to take on opportunities she never expected.
Looking back, the graduate said those unexpected opportunities are often the ones worth pursuing.
“Just try anything that comes your way,” said Williams. “And just hope that you don’t look back one day and think like, ‘Oh, man, I wish I would have done that.’”