TIP: Surviving the Fall Semester
The Daily Plan-it is asking recent alumni and graduating students to share tips about surviving and thriving in the Fall semester. Responses (some of them contradicting each other, some of them repetitive, many not endorsed by the J-school) will be added here throughout the semester, lightly edited for clarity and style (the newest ones on top).
Please send your suggestions (for either semester) to ss221@columbia.edu.
[See tips about the Spring semester here.]
In the Fall semester at J-School, I wish I had…
- Chosen my electives better, sometimes the class sounds great but the professor isn’t as great. Choose wisely! And also, make sure you are choosing a class because that is the one you love, not the one everyone else is dying to get into. Enjoy your friends and remember that after graduation most of you will part ways, so make the best of the time you have together.
- read the ethnic press, and especially community-based websites
- taken the Q, F and 7 trains out to their terminus’ and gotten more of a feel for the city. It’s worth the time–you’ll be 50
percent less lost later, and you’ll see some cool stuff along the way. - carried cash more
- …taken the time to read my professors’ books. At least one of them.
- …invested in more and better long underwear. Uniqlo (Prince St. on the R/W) makes warming tights/tanktops/undershirts for men and women. They’re cheap, fit under clothes and will make your life suck less inwinter.
- …introduced myself to more people/organizations (not just on my beat) dealing with things that interested me
- taken new media training since the very first week. You won’t find the time later on to get that introduction and you will always betrying to catch up while seeing the others handle it perfectly.
- gone to more of the August music concerts and cultural events in town…
- done an internship. Everybody tells you to hold off because you will just be getting into things and gettingused to the schedule and the pace, etc. Ignore them. The spring semester is five times as insane as the fall semester and you’ll be sorry if you don’t do any internships while you’re in the thick of the New York City media world. That said, if you have never worked in journalism before and everything in RW1 is new to you - okay - yeah, take it easy. But if you have been a working journalist and
if you can find an internship where you can negotiate only a day in the office - and maybe a little work from home - and where you’ll actually get to write (this isn’t that hard since everyone has decimated their staff and is desperate for
content, especially blogs and sister Web sites to print publications) then DO IT. I did a spring internship and it was great in the end, but I regret not doing one in the fall when things were a little more laid back. If you do get a fall internship, don’t ever, ever, ever tell your RW1 professor you couldn’t cover something or get something done because of your internship or any other class or activity. In fact, it’s best they don’t even know you have an internship because they’ll likely just assume anything they see as less than stellar work is because of the distraction of your internship. Good luck! - chosen my elective based on the professor, not the subject.
- taken time to enjoy the city rather than obssesively fret over RW1 due to an obsessive professor. Do your best but don’t let someone else’s obsession permeate to you.
- taken an internship. Yes, even in the Fall semester (no matter how busy you get with school, internships in New York are the best way to improve your resume and get a job).
- taken a deep breath. What seemed stressful then, I realize now was just part of the normal J-school process.
- drank less coffee (especially the jet-fuel type served downstairs).
- gone to Career Services earlier. It’s not as scary as it sounds - and you’re going to have to get a job sometime!
- realized that switching into the part-time program for the spring semester isn’t that hard after all. If you’re serious about freelancing or spending lots of time at a spring internship, it can be a good way to go.
- sought resume feedback from people outside of the Career Services office. Take every opportunity to have someone currently in the industry look over your resume and clips.
- built a better list of story ideas for my RWI beat in August. Scrambling to find a good housing story idea on a Tuesday in October — with a Thursday morning deadline — was not fun.
- taken new media classes. Online skills are so important and you should take advantage of being in a school environment to learn as much as you can. It will pay off after you graduate.
- taken more advantage of opportunities to re-write articles.
- tried to freelance some of my articles and possibly radio pieces.
- explored New York City more because it is a lie that you have more time in the spring semester.
- …known that feeling overwhelmed isn’t a catastrophe. Instead, it was the first step toward finding my own priorities. On the other hand, I’m glad I told some of my profs that I was feeling overwhelmed. They helped me to remember why I sought out the M.A. program in the first place and led me to some great insights into whatwas important to me. In the end, it was all good for me: the workload, the brain strain, the stumbling, and the getting back up again.
- …gone to more Happy Hours.
- …spent more time on my Master’s Project so I could have taken more of a winter break.
- …gotten to know my classmates better.
- …attended more of the optional lectures.
- …stayed in better touch with non-journalist friends.
- …took the narrative writing elective (so that I could experiment with those awesome narrative techniques in my Spring classes and in the Master’s Projects).
- …taken more skills courses. I only took one, and now I wish I had also taken the others in photography, radio, etc. just to have that broad base of skills under my belt that would make me much more marketable to employers.
- …reached out and established a relationship with at least one of my professors — this will really help you down the road, whether it’s just to talk you through the stress come second semester or to point you to some good job prospects (on their own terms of
course). - …hadn’t approached profs just looking for job tips. You *will* connect with at least one professor, and just having that solid, genuine, outside-of-just-class-time friendship will be enough.
- …tried and made my stories do double time by exploring the logical ripples from one drop in the pond. For example: If you have an education story about arranged marriages, see if you can also get a business story about matchmakers, a lifestyle story on new types of dating, and a religion story on converts to faiths that promote marriage arrangements.
- …realized that every student is supremely talented. I wish I’d shaken off my
undergraduate, must-get-honors, competitive mentality and just enjoyed — and learned — from all my classmates. Also, I shouldn’t have let my classmates’ designer jeans and giant
Fendi bags intimidate me. - …applied for internships.
- …prepared a stack of resumes and clips before class started, which would have made applying for internships less of a burden.
- …chosen professors more carefully. Track down outgoing students — you should be able to find some by looking up their published work online — and grill them about which professors to seek out and which to avoid. If you can make it to campus, read the course reviews on file
at the J-School library. [DAILY PLAN-IT NOTE: This last sentence is no longer relevant. Starting with the Spring 2005 courses, all course evaluations are now online for incoming students anywhere in the world.] - …made a list of the names, numbers and e-mails of managing editors at
amNew York, Metro, City Limits and the weekly newspapers that covered my beat and pitched my RWI stories to them on a regular basis. - …. read Bob Baker’s Newsthinking. It is especially important to read if you do not have a journalism background.
- …had a copy of the Upanishads to read to put life into perspective for those times when I
left the J-school feeling overwhelmed. The big questions posed in the Upanishads could have diminished the significance of the little episodes of worthlessness I felt after some of my edited stories came back bleeding. - …applied for internships.
- …pitched more freelance work.
- …participated in some sort of activity wholly unrelated to school.
- …gone to more Happy Hours.
- …explored NYC (apart from my beat).
- …read more Master’s Projects in the library.
- …started exploring my Master’s Project during the summer (at least have a general topic you’re passionate about and that you’d like to learn more about before the first day of school).
- …been more prepared for failure on all fronts (don’t stress
when your stories suck - you’re there to learn not win a Pulitzer). - …bought a bike. (This is vital. You will cover six times the area on your beat, and actually enjoy it. Biking New York lets you see the 90% of the city that isn’t convenient to a subway line, and all of my great RW1 stories came from out-of-the-way places. Then enjoy the Palisades across the GW bridge or take off your journalist cap and ride with us at Critical Mass last Friday of the month, Union Square, 7 pm.
- …picked an RWI beat neighborhood more off the beaten path (I picked
Harlem, which is always inundated with J-Schoolers. I wish I’d picked
a nabe in Queens or the Bronx). - …spent less time beating myself up because I wasn’t getting many
clips, and more time enjoying the experience.
