News Lawyer

With Thanksgiving approaching and some students already heading out of town, Columbia Journalism School paraded a series of professors in front of an auditorium of students this afternoon to entice and inform students regarding their upcoming choices for spring semester. Each professor got a few minutes to detail their classes and make a personal pitch for the assembled students to select their courses.

Most Columbia Journalism students are fulltimers in for one year only, so institutional memory of the possibilities can be found in one of only a few places – class evaluations whose written contents are specifically withheld by the administration, the hard-to-pin part-timers, and the occasional unguarded faculty member, whose motivations can range from angelic to Machiavellian. And with only this semester to choose before graduation, a group of us poured over tonight’s handouts in the dark corners of a local beer & burger joint to weigh our options. Some thoughts:

1. In addition to completing a Master’s Project, each student is required to take one six credit seminar, one six credit workshop, and one three credit elective. Tough choices all around. My New Media Master’s Project seems to lock me into a New Media Workshop – not a bad thing, but the overcrowding and on-the-fly feel to the New Media courseload has left feelings of unease among some of the concentrators, particularly with so many tried-and-true Workshop offerings for the taking.

2. Courses are selected on a balloting system – select your top three choices for each category and you will assuredly get one of your three. But with some courses historically tougher to get into than others, gamesmanship opportunities abound! For example, let’s say I want to take “Sports Journalism” with Sandy Padwe as my elective. If my heart is set here, I can select two popular courses that don’t interest me, propelling me into the course I want. Perhaps students have already been subconsciously doing this for years – there might be professors who owe their popularity to game theory! And of course, I could get stuck with my third choice.

3. I really wanted to take “Covering Religion”, but my New Media Master’s Project got in the way. The class takes a fully funded trip overseas each spring, one which overlaps with the Master’s Project deadline. Last year the class visited India, while this year they plan to go to Ireland. Pretty sweet deal, but I probably would have taken the class without the trip, alas.

4. With MIT already offering online courses, when is Columbia Journalism School going to put its money where its mouth is and offer students (and maybe more importantly, alum) the opportunity to take courses online?  Several visiting graduates expressed no small amounts of envy when shown the current New Media curricula, and past students would certainly benefit from Flash training or other New Media skills easily taught online.