Possible to switch for Law School to Journalism School?

Graduate School
1

<p>So, I’ve just finished one year at Law School and i’ve decided it isn’t for me. I am interested in a Journalism grad school program. However, their are a few issues that concern me. </p>

<li>I didn’t major in journalism as an ungrad. is this a requirement for attending grad school? </li>
<li>Do you have to take the regular GRE or a specific Journalism program exam? </li>
</ol>

<p>My undergrad degree was in Psychology and Criminal Justice (with honors) and I had a 3.5GPA. </p>

<p>I got a 165(92%) on the LSAT and have a 2.95GPA (slightly below a B average) after my first year in law school. </p>

<p>Is there any chance that I will be able to attend a top journalism program? what are the usual GPA numbers and/or experience that they require? </p>

<p>thanks for all of the info.</p>

2

<p>there are lots of threads on here about admission to journalism programs, so you should be able to find those by doing a search.</p>

<p>but i can tell you that most grad programs will require the GRE general test. they won’t accept your LSAT score in lieu of the GRE, so unfortunately you’ll get to take a whole new standardized test. columbia’s program doesn’t require the GRE and instead administers its own writing test based on knowledge of current events. name all 9 supreme court justices or the two largest oil-producing nations in latin america, etc.</p>

<p>your undergrad GPA sounds sufficient for most programs, though it’s on the low side for columbia and berkeley. your law grades are a bit low for some top programs, but your experience (however minimal) in law will generally be seen of as a bonus, so that may even itself out. lots of j-students come in with no knowledge of law, business, or science, so when someone comes along that can report on these issues with some credibility, it’s weighted heavily in their favour.</p>

<p>you don’t need an undergrad in journalism for grad school. if anything, BAs in journalism are frowned upon at the grad level because grad programs feel like they have to unteach those students everything they’ve already learned. so don’t sweat that one.</p>

<p>experience is the big sticking point. to any of these programs, you will need to submit a portfolio of work. articles for the school paper are okay, but for top programs (columbia, berkeley, northwestern) that alone is rarely sufficient. try to get op-eds published, try to freelance for your local publications, try to work at a radio or television station for a summer.</p>

<p>a friend of mine just finished up at columbia, and he was an editor on his school paper and wrote for a city’s newsblog with really high readership. i was accepted to columbia after working on documentaries with an emmy-winning news producer. one of our projects was nominated for two emmys, both in categories in which i contributed, so i got to add those to my CV. that’s a big factor in my own admission to most schools, but that, coupled with a 3.7 GPA and solid GRE scores, wasn’t enough to even merit an interview at berkeley. so… i imagine it can get pretty competitive.</p>

<p>i have to ask, though… why journalism school? being a journalist requires no accreditation, unlike being a lawyer. you don’t need the degree. it’s a university cash grab that will set you back $60,000, minimum, and at best you’ll start on the third-from-the-bottom rung on the ladder instead of the very bottom rung. just working for three years can get you as far as a j-school degree (even one from columbia) without the debt.</p>

<p>my friend from columbia has three internship positions right now, none of which are paid. he works long hours on bad stories (i’m not sure if they’re assigned to him or he comes up with them himself, but they’re pretty poor). he’s putting himself further in debt so he can stay in manhattan and hope that at the end of his indentured servitude to NPR and the BBC, someone will hire him on. with the way the industry is struggling right now, hiring prospects are dim. and that’s putting it nicely. what’s more, his three unpaid internships make him the envy of his graduating cohort, many of whom have not come up so well in their job hunts.</p>

<p>just… think about it. if you really want to be a journalist, save yourself the money and start looking for jobs with local publications now and network.</p>

3

<p>Thanks for your help. </p>

<p>My direct journalism is limited, but their is some things there. I had a college radio show for 2 years that was mostly music based, but i did interviews every now and then. I also wrote short (approx 10 sentences) music reviews for a college publication a number of times. </p>

<p>While the law school education is obviously very different from journalism, a number of the things I learned would be very useful, i imagine. Legal Research and Writing was one of the classes i took this year, which involved complex and lengthy research on various legal issues. I feel like this would be relevant information to put on my file. I am also currently interning at a Prosecutor’s Office, where I have had to write legal memo’s and observe some court-cases. The main difference is the writing style that the legal profession desires. It is generally very to-the-point and does not put a focus on creativity or trying to “stick out” from everyone else. </p>

<p>I was wondering if you didn’t mind specifying what your GRE scores were. I would just like to know what is considered a “solid score”. Also, do journalism programs look at all components of the GRE? </p>

<p>I reason I wanted to attend journalism grad school is simply because it seemed like the most logical thing to do for someone in my position. Since i don’t have any formal journalism training/experience, it looks like a good way to hone in on those skills. From a financial standpoint, i am in the fortunate position that my family were plaintiff’s in a large legal settlement. So, I have the finances to afford the education (is it only a 1-year program?) and not be in any debt afterwards. </p>

<p>I am slighty concerned about having to work for no-pay once one is finisehd with the schooling program though. How does one pay-the-bills etc? are their many fellowship/scholarship type things to apply for in the journalism field? or is it almost always going to be more loans? </p>

<p>thanks again for all of your help.</p>

4

<p>my GRE score was 670 verbal (95th %ile), 690 quantitative (70th %ile), 5.5 analytical (88th %ile). journalism schools will only care about the verbal score unless you want to do business journalism, in which case the quantitative score will also matter.</p>

<p>you don’t need any formal journalism training to be a journalist. really. that can be hard for many to grasp, especially the proponents of j-school on this forum, but there are only 2 or 3 schools where a journalism grad degree will give you any sort of leg up on those without them: columbia, berkeley, and northwestern. and northwestern being the “or 3” option, as they’ve recently revamped their entire program to focus more on teaching students how to sell themselves to publishers and editors than how to write news and the change has been met with mixed reviews.</p>

<p>further, to get into any of those three schools, you already need a decent measure of experience in journalism. the two years in radio will help but the 10-sentence music reviews won’t do much for you unless you plan to focus on cultural criticism or art reviews, that sort of thing. i’d recommend writing some articles on your own and sending them to a local paper, hoping they get published. you can submit unpublished articles as writing samples, but that’ll really handicap you in the admissions process.</p>

<p>columbia is 1 year, most others are 2 (i think… i applied for some joint degrees, so those usually take a year or two longer than normal).</p>

<p>you should be extremely concerned about having to work for no pay once you have your degree. i’ll reiterate: my colleague went to the absolute best journalism program in the world and the best employment he can secure are unpaid internships. his colleagues are either in the same boat or worse off, without any jobs in the journalism field at all.</p>

<p>you pay the bills by taking out loans or falling back on family savings. or working another full-time job on top of your unpaid internship. there are very, very few fellowships or scholarships available, and they are not merely merit-based. they are reserved for visible minorities or people from adverse backgrounds, and if i may be candid with you, your grades and your lack of journalism experience will probably prevent you from winning those scholarships.</p>

<p>you do not need a graduate degree to be a journalist. but in order to get into a good journalism grad program, you need more journalistic experience than you currently have. now, many will tell you here that you could apply to boston university, or NYU, or missouri, or other programs that have journalism grad programs, and you definitely can. and you may well get in there and win a small amount of financial aid (although definitely not enough to cover tuition and expenses). but those programs will not further you in the journalism industry. you would do just as well, and probably better, to work for those years instead of being in grad school.</p>

<p>at the end of the day, a journalism degree gives you one thing: the ability to network and get your foot in the door to some places it would’ve taken 3 or 4 years to get to. if you can afford to pay for school yourself, and you can find a way to support yourself during a year or two of unpaid internships afterward, then j-school would be a good idea. if you can’t afford that, do not do it.</p>

<p>columbia is what i like to call the $40,000 mistake. it’s the best there is, and in this job market, their grads can’t get a job to save their lives. you can look online for news reports on the state of newsmedia right now. magazines are folding left and right, local newspapers are closing down, major newspapers have frozen their hiring, let people go, and issued pay cuts. part of this is the economy being in the tank, and part of it is traditional media struggling to adapt to new media. even after the economic turnaround, this industry will still be struggling. if you’re not absolutely dedicated to journalism as a principle and an ideal, look to something else. it’s a bad time to get into the news business.</p>

5

<p>one last thing…</p>

<p>look in your area to see if there are any journalism programs at universities. any at all. scope out the faculty listings, email one of the faculty members, and ask if he or she knows of any colleagues looking to hire interns. paid or unpaid. chances are they’ll know someone who needs a little work done. you might just be logging or transcribing tapes or doing some fact-checking, but if you prove yourself to be smart and dedicated, more work will come your way. it’ll build your resume before you apply to grad school (if you decide to apply despite what i’ve told you), or it’ll just lead to employment opportunities.</p>

<p>that is exactly how i got my first paying job in journalism, and after two years of working far too hard for much too little (although i was actually paid, surprisingly), i was offered an assistant producer gig on a documentary for a national television station and a prominent research and producing position on a feature-length doc and a book. two years. had i decided to go to columbia, i would’ve been turning down those jobs to relearn what my boss/mentor had already taught me while putting myself into debt.</p>

<p>that mentor used to teach at columbia and NYU and now teaches at the university of british columbia, in vancouver, where i live. his grad students were jealous of the contact i had with him and the amount of trust and responsibility he put in me. one of their class projects was to produce a documentary for television, and his students dropped the ball. he phoned me and asked if i could come in on thanksgiving to fix their technical mistakes. i said yes, and i did it. it took 14 hours and i sat there until it was done, because they had a deadline to meet. if you have that sort of dedication, it’ll pay off in spades with or without the degree.</p>

<p>and if you don’t have that sort of dedication to journalism (it’s a 24 hr job), then save yourself the numerous headaches. :)</p>