The Litmus Test

As I start my journey in the course of JOUR 485, I can only hope this is where my skills in Journalism thus far are efficiently put to the test.

Lord willing, I will be graduating this coming May and will begin my journalistic career out in the real world. I sufficiently believe I’ve already learned my fair share about writing (though I can always learn a whole lot more), so what I hope to get out of my last semester at Liberty is one final round of litmus tests to see if what I’ve learned has really stuck. In only a few months I will be thrown into the breach, so a final round of challenges definitely couldn’t hurt.

While I enjoy solo projects, I still have trouble working with groups when it comes to writing/creative assignments. I can be fairly stubborn about doing things my way, and if the group disagrees I tend to take over that portion of the assignment and do things the ‘right’ way and save everyone else the trouble. This is obviously a flaw that I need to work on; it can hardly be considered ‘team work’ if I exclude myself from the team. According to the syllabus, the main focus of the class will be working on one large news story, all of us on our own. This gives me the opportunity to work solo (as I prefer), but perhaps some healthy interaction with classmates and seeing how their stories are going will expose me to different, perhaps more beneficial, styles of research.

A mistake on my part this semester was backloading all of my most difficult classes into my final semester (oops!). I’m no stranger to 18 credit semesters, but this spring I will be a combination of all 300 and 400 level classes, none of which I can simply blow off or ignore. That means a lot of long nights of studying a research; something a journalist should be no stranger to. This might as well be seen as beneficial- stress and time management may give you gray hair, but I welcome the salt-and-pepper look! It’s going to be a tough few months, and that will be a form of learning in and of itself.