"Interesting" is a word far too passed around to do my stint in Reporting and Writing II any justice. "Peculiar" would be a better word. The fact that I was also taking Editing II, a class which is supposed to come after Reporting II, was a bit of a conundrum as I was essentially taking two classes for the exact same thing, only in one I was required to generate content on a weekly basis and in the other I only had to do so every three. Needless to say, I put a bit more effort into Editing II.
This isn't to say that I wrote off Reporting II as something below me. I enjoy writing, it's what I do. Every assignment was given just as much thought and attention as any of my other journalistic undertakings this semester. It was all a very simple process really. Recognize an audience, formulate an idea for a story that would interest them, contact whoever needed to be contacted, interview, compile the data, and edit it into a flowing piece of journalistic art. Bing-bang-boom.
Some weeks I questioned why I even came to class. I was either already done with everything I needed to do or knew exactly what I was going to do for my next story. Class seemed to just fill space and time that could have been spent doing something more important. But I've got more honor than that. For one thing, Chris Godsey, the busy, busy man, spends hours of his valuable time to educate us on reporting and writing (although some might say that educate is a relative term when it comes to journalism). For another, I'm paying for the privilege of him to do so. Anyone can get everything I've learned book-wise on journalism for free on the internet, we can call up journalists and talk to them about their careers for free, we can write articles and blogs for free, but we cannot get professionally dictated assignments aimed at assessing our skills and aimed at improving those skills into something useful in the career-world. After four years, I've grown tired of passing people in the hallway who talk about how much they skip classes because they really don't care. This world is lost on false rogues and mental bandits, people who think that they are more devious than they really are.
I had fun this semester. Writing stories. Not giving lessons. Lessons felt like busy work. Lessons felt like time-filling in a class where the majority of the work was done outside of class. And then I was in a group with Mary. The week we presented she came up to me and asked, "Is twenty-five minutes too long for my topic?" She asked this before finding out that the rest of us had around eight minutes of material combined. It really put me in a sort of power struggle as I was the unofficial leader of the group. I'd arranged our meetings outside of class, got ideas on the topic from everyone, and I had something different than enthusiasm. What was it? A sort of assertiveness that the members of the group, save for Mary, kind of submitted to. In the end, I got her to cut down on her topic a bit, but I don't think she was happy about it.
Chris was an awesome teacher. Maybe its that I thought of him more as a mentor than a teacher. He's still in grad-school for crying out loud. And I'm 22 for another thing. It's hard to hold onto the student-teacher mentality when the age gap me and an increasing number of professors in becoming recognizably small. I've got brothers that are his age. People with lives and careers who may not have the most experience but who can iterate that experience so much more clearly because they can remember it so much more clearly than say an elderly professor would. And maybe its the fact that this isn't just another class-lecture-book-study-test-repeat class either. I joined journalism because I got sick of that formula. There's no creativity there and I wasn't very good at it anyway.
I'm pleased with my work this semester. I got to meet a lot of interesting people and reporting on things that not only interest me but the Duluth community as well. Via LakeVoice, I know that my stories were fairly well received, the Left 4 Duluth story and Tiona Marco stories especially.
Going forward, things are a bit unsure. I've had a number of interviews so far where I was told that my writing is very good, but I have no experience. Or at least, I have no marketable experience. Regardless of how good my writing is, businesses want an experienced person to employ. This makes my life a bit of a peculiarity as I am no longer in school to get college-based internships and no job will take me without experience under my belt. It seems like nobody tells you how to get in the door until its closing time. This isn't to say that I've given up. Applications for fall internships at many publications are coming up soon, ones that require degrees, so I'm still hopeful. In the mean time, I'll start a blog. I'll write every day. Because I write, it's what I do.
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