Reviewing my Journalism Education. One Year At a Time. Part 1

Hindsight is 2020. Mine is 2010 HA! No, but really...

Seeing as how the final class of my Undergraduate career, and more than likely my final class ever is tomorrow afternoon and I'm in the process of applying for jobs, I'm a little nostalgic on my last 4 years of J-School. So I apologize, these posts will somewhat resemble a brain-dump...but if you so choose, join me on my journey.

Summer Welcome: traumatic. My parents read on the registration papers that they weren't required to attend. So they shipped me off to Summer Welcome by myself in a city 2 hours away. This should have been a pretty good indicator as to how my journalism education was going to work...being thrown in against my will...head first.

Needless to say if you know anything about Mizzou's Summer Welcome...I was the ONLY person there, in a group of around 200 without a parent. And without a friend. So I was a little alienated until I met a girl here (with her parents) from New Mexico. I was kind of adopted into the Costales Family...and to this day Gabrielle Costales and I are still the best of friends, and we will be walking the stage together next week. (Holy cow...is it really next week?? Grumble...)

Freshman Year First Semester: Oh how I miss dorm food. But NOT my first roommate with cleanliness issues and NOT my first round of classes that seemed to resemble busy work. Bio class, psychology, Spanish 2...don't miss those. My first Journalism class...J 1010 AKA Career Explorations in Journalism AKA a complete waste of a weekday evening. I could have gotten the same thing out of that class as if someone had come in to my dorm for a 2 hour required meeting on the different sequences. It was recruiting. And it felt like recruiting. I remember being told it was the first of the "weeder" classes that would weed people not truly interested in Journalism out of the field. Frankly, the class was deceptively easy, and most definitely not a weeder class.

What else I remember from this semester...I remember heartbreak. Losing that High School Significant Other that everybody told me and everyone else in that situation to leave at home. I didn't. And I paid for it with my social life. I didn't bother making very many friends. I was depressed. My parents dropped me off and left me. My boyfriend dropped me off and left me. And gosh darn it, I was going to sit at home and sulk and hope that there would be a knock on my tiny little dorm room door. That knock never came. And I learned, with the help of my friends Gabby, Missy, and Mickey, that I needed to pick myself up and focus on what was important. So I did, and I somehow managed to come out of that semester with flying colors. And a few new friends.

Freshman Year Second Semester: This is when the fact that I was a college student and I had to make my own way truly hit home. It took some tough love from my new group of friends the Lunch Bunch to get there. But without this semester I would have been packing it home to UMKC's College of Pharmacology. I decided that journalism was more important to me. So I stayed. And I sat through Principles of American Journalism, which is a class I remember very little of. What hit home to me...Jaqui Banaszynski's presentation. That showed me the difference journalism can make in the world. And from that moment on I was absolutely addicted.