Stop telling me Journalism isn’t a real degree

When you tell people you study Journalism, their immediate response is often “Oh, at Hallam?”. For some reason people struggle to believe, that God forbid, Journalism could ever be available at a Russell Group University. 

Just because it isn’t a traditional university subject like English Literature or History, it isn’t any less academic or credible. Granted it’s undoubtedly a vocational subject, but there are too many negative connotations surrounding the term, probably as a result of the classic BTEC bashing during secondary school. There is no good reason for job-focused degrees to be scrutinised. If you think about it, Architecture, Nursing and even Medicine are all vocational degrees, but does anyone hold those courses with such hostility? Studying Journalism, a career orientated degree, still puts you in a better position than studying broader subjects such as Media Studies. Why study media when you can learn how to produce it yourself? Unless you want to spend your whole life lecturing and writing books, that is.

Shorthand anyone?

It’s often assumedJournalism, being easily grouped with English, has a light timetable. This couldn’t be further from the truth, you’ll often have more lectures in a day than those doing hard, serious and more well respected courses like Biomed, and where to even begin with the early starts. Shorthand alone probably takes up more hours than your entire course does. You can expect to have up to 15 hours of shorthand a week, starting at 8am. Yes, 8am. Every. Single. Weekday. Having to drag yourself to lectures before the sun is even up certainly takes nights out on weekdays out of the question. Even a sober, early ending night results in the oh so familiar scene of your eyes rolling back into your head and your face eventually on the desk.

There’s a lot more to studying Journalism than sitting in lecture theatres, reading books and writing essays. You’re not chained to your desk. You get to go out in the real world, put your newly gained skills into practise and learn how to perfect your craft in real life working situations; researching, conducting interviews and even attending council meetings. Sounds better than your usual 9-5 in Hicks, right?

You do get to see beaut sunrises like this to be fair

But don’t let this make you think studying Journalism is some sort of field day, we have lots of reading,  just like every other subject, to fit around our already busy timetables and study dry, fundamental, and extremely dry modules such as ethics, public administration and media law. It’s time we all stopped mocking Journalism, and for that matter,  judging any degrees as worth less than someone else’s. Just whatever you do, don’t complain about your 9am starts and be thankful you don’t have to wake up at 6.30am every morning.