"You know how I can tell a J-student [journalism student] and a Tufts student apart? In their cover letters, Tufts students will have a beautifully written cover letter, but the best part--the thing I want to know--will be at the very end. For J-school [journalism school] students, they always start with the important information. Always."
A Tufts alum and LA Times reporter told me and other prospective journalists this story at the Tufts On the Media career event. She made it to the journalism world with a liberal arts background, but she knows the pros and cons for both a liberal arts and a pre-professional education. As liberal arts students, many of us have a passion to change the world and a critical mind to learn about society. However, there are information gathering, technical news writing, and production skills that require more time and effort outside of the classroom.
Whether you're like me and knew you wanted to work in journalism since freshman year or you watched The Newsroom and found your calling, there are a lot of ways that Tufts can prep you for the career without offering a specific journalism major.
Learning by doing
Campus publications and media outlets are a great place to learn skills while creating content. However, prepare for your extracurricular life to take over at times...Most of my journalism and writing experience has come from writing for school publications like the Tufts Daily, Tufts Enigma and, of course, the Career Center! These different publications have given me a range of experiences from reporting to data journalism to social media writing. My opinion these days is that as a college student, you can never learn too many skills. It's always worth trying something out just to see what you like, what you don't like and what you may have a natural talent for. There are so many publications and different media outlets on campus--Tufts Podcast Network, TUTV and WMFO are all media outlets where you can gain hands-on experience.
Even though they will eat away at those hours in between classes, when you apply for internships, you'll be glad you have something to talk about when your employer asks about "experience" and something to submit when they request writing samples.
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| Will McAvoy dabbles in all types of media, too (source) |
In the classroom
Even though we don't have a journalism major, you can still learn technical skills within the academic departments at Tufts. There are Journalism and Intermediate Journalism courses at Tufts. They're good for an introduction to journalism writing. The Film and Media Studies department has media practice classes like Filmmaking I, which can teach you the basics of shooting and editing. They work closely with the ExCollege to organize unique classes for journalism and media practice. This year there were classes on radio journalism and multi-platform journalism--both of which filled up before I could register (typical). But I'm not worried--each semester brings a new crop of creative journalism courses, so keep an eye out for the ExCollege course offerings for Fall 2016!
Whenever you have time
If you haven't joined a media club on campus, you can still learn some technical skills and create cool pieces with the resources that Tufts offers through these online and on-campus spaces:• The Adobe Creative Cloud is available on university computers, or you can purchase it for your own computer use for $20! It includes fun things like Photoshop, Indesign (page layout/design), and Primiere (video editing).
• Tufts Digital Design Studio has lots of fun things to play with (I mean, learn with) like multimedia workstations for audio/visual and web publishing projects, recording rooms for producing audio narrations, and a green screen wall for filming!
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| How you feel after getting your digital skills down (source) |
Use your liberal arts powers!
As a liberal arts student, don't doubt your powers and skills in the journalism world. John Ciampa, Tufts FMS Program Administrator, offers some words of inspiration:
"I think a liberal arts education can really inform the journalistic education because it's broadly based and conceptual. It's not enough to have practical skill. You need to know what to do with the information gathered and synthesize it and contextualize it for the reader to understand."
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| Never forget that ^^ (source) |
Thanks for reading!
Nina Joung
Class of 2018
