Wall Street Journal Article:College Graduate Decides To Enrol In A Masters Degree Program.

By Gianna Palmer

If someone had told me earlier in my college career that upon graduating I would enroll in yet another year of school, I wouldn’t have believed them. And yet, that’s exactly what I’ve opted to do. Next week I will begin working toward a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University. My job search, therefore, has ceased—for now.

In hindsight, it seems a bit ironic that I spent nearly a year sending out dozens of cover letters and resumes to various jobs and paid fellowships. (Not to mention the fact that I’ve been blogging about the search for employment!) In the end, the application that determined my immediate post-college plans wasn’t for a job at all, but for grad school.

I first heard about Columbia’s program in journalism from a 20-something coworker at the newspaper I interned at last summer. He’d just graduated from Columbia himself and told me the school had paid for his education in full. I’d enjoyed my stints writing for school newspapers and blogs, and had found my summer internships in journalism to be both challenging and exciting. With my broad, liberal-arts background as an undergraduate, the prospect of getting formal training in my field of interest seemed like a good idea. The way I saw it, I had nothing to lose by applying.

Getty Images

The Journalism Building at Columbia University

It was only once I was admitted that things got complicated.

Before ultimately deciding to matriculate, I spent a solid six weeks waffling between options. I held on to my enrollment response form until the last possible day. The crux of my indecision stemmed from financial concerns. As it turns out, Columbia’s resources, much like my own, are limited. Unlike my former coworker, I was not offered a full ride— far from it. Next, I discovered that the federal grants I’d received throughout undergraduate years weren’t available for graduate school. How then, if at all, could I afford to go to j-school?

It took many scholarship applications, family discussions and phone calls to the financial aid office before I came to a tentative answer to this question. Essentially, the financial backing for my grad school education will boil down to a mix of aid from Columbia, outside scholarships, familial generosity and quite possibly, more loans. This hodgepodge of resources aside, it wasn’t until one of my good friends, a native New Yorker, offered to house me for the year that I began to think things might actually work out financially.

Beyond financial considerations, I had to grapple with whether or not graduate school was the right choice for me, period. Unlike the aspiring academics, lawyers and doctors I know, an advanced degree has never been an inevitable part of my future. Furthermore, I realize that going to journalism school is certainly not the only way to become a writer or reporter: While plenty of accomplished journalists have gone to j-school, there are plenty who have not. I’m also well aware that the field of journalism is at a crossroads. Journalism schools would have you believe that the industry is simply evolving, but many other people would say it’s collapsing.

Despite these uncertainties, I ultimately decided that I couldn’t justify not going to Columbia. Of the remaining jobs I was considering, none seemed as exciting or as promising as year of writing and reporting with New York City as my classroom. My hope is that journalism school will teach me what my time as an undergraduate reporter and summer intern has not. If I pursue a career as a journalist, I will have many years to learn and improve on the job. It’s at Columbia that I hope to first gain a firmer understanding of what it takes to be an effective, ethical journalist.

Though I’ve put all things related to employment on hold, my work for the year is only jus