Thoughts of a Master Student in Journalism at a Top US School
One of my friends who used to be an active member of Phd forum shares her thoughts about graduate schools and graduate student's life in US. She started the Master in Journalism in Fall 2009 at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, IL.
PART 1: Journalism school sucks! (OR something you should consider before coming to the U.S. for a Master in Journalism course)By Huong L. Vu.
This is the first part of a series of my graduate school experience here.
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Surviving after a harsh “boot-camp”
Although I am always consider myself to be an imaginative person, I never could have visualized as tight of a schedule as the one I had in my very first quarter overseas. From the first week at Medill, I thought I could never make it through this quarter and I should packed my stuff to catch a flight home immediately if I didn’t want to drown in tons of lectures and homework here.
Normally, a graduate student is expected to go to school a couple of days a week for a class that might be two to three hours long. But I had classes from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. every single day of the week. The rest of my days were spent reading hundreds of pages a week and doing tons of homework. Even my American classmates rarely went to bed before midnight, usually around 1 or 2 a.m., it is not surprising that I was going to bed at 4 a.m., sometimes 6, and then getting up at 8 a.m. to get to school.
I remember one week we had four assignments for the Newswriting class alone. One of these assignments was the soundslide story, another was the numbers story, the third was the speech story and I can’t remember what the fourth was now. The matter is that our assignments were time-consuming and required much effort. We first had to figure out a story idea and then scramble to get contacts to interview or ask for access to the event. The next step was plunging to the scene and conducting interview, shooting video and/or recording audio, usually at the same time. Finally, using all our creativeness and technical skills to transfer every piece of information we got into an attention-grabbing story with the highest level of fact-accuracy and language usage. On average, each of these stories took me around eight hours to work on. And, remember; since we were at school all the day, only evenings and weekends could be used for working on those stories. Also, do not forget; we were taking three other classes in which none of my professors was ever kind enough to get us a week off readings and assignments.
One of our professors realized the fear and tiredness in each of us, so she sent a message to the entire class: “We know this is a lot… That's why Methods is unofficially called "boot camp." What, nobody told you?” However, many people from my programs, including me, thought it was even harsher the military boot camp.
Being a “stranger” in the U.S.
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“Journalism is all about language and culture. I can’t imagine how you can work as a journalist in another country.” – That’s what a staff member from my school told me when I discussed with her about my plan for the coming quarters.
It is painful to play with words in another language. Definitely!
Sometimes, I was terrified because I could not understand the “key words” in an interview, maybe these words were totally new to me or they could be a long-time friend with American “mincing” pronunciation. But it became full of despair when I could not find the perfect word to express exactly what I was thinking and what I wanted to convey in my story. I also hate the feeling of being stupid when I used synonyms in the wrong nuance. That’s what my professors called “awkward expression.”
A journalistic article, unlike a scientific paper, must be not only accurate but appealing as well. No matter how newsworthy and interesting your information is, readers will throw your newspaper away if either your language usage or your writing style is lackluster. If you sit down and try to write a 800-word piece in your native language in a topic that you are very interested in, are you sure that you can attract your readers attention right from the first few lines and keep their concentration to the end? And now, imagine writing about something you’ve never heard about before in another language. I bet it’s a hundred times harder!
From time to time, I pushed myself to find a pretty word, a common phrase, an idiom, or even slang to replace the dull words we learnt from high school’s English lessons, but it sometimes was a “mission impossible” due to my limited vocabulary and restricted time. Most of time when I opened a Word file to start writing my stories, I always made a wish that either could I write in Vietnamese or my native language was English. But none happened! So I got stuck in all that stuff.
But language is not the only challenge. Lacking of background in every field of life is something even worse. What the hell does an alderman do? What the heck is a chucky? What is the “fucking” candy sale? There is a very tiny chance for you to know all those freaky things (not freaky for Americans) if you have been living outside the U.S. borders more than 20 years.
But these annoying things kept smacking me in the face whenever I interviewed people here. They were always talking about something that I had no “fucking” idea about.
I will never forget a stupid experience when a father of an elementary student told me about the “Market Day” to raise funds for his daughter’s school. I interrupted him to ask when the Market Day was. He was a little bit surprised but then very polite to explain that it is not a specific day; it is actually a program all over the U.S. during the school year. You can imagine this situation like a person coming to Vietnam for the first time hears about “Cho Am Phu”.
You may think it’s not a big deal because we can ask them to explain. But I am supposed to be a reporter, not a five-year-old girl who keeps asking about whatever an adult says. Moreover, people regularly spend 15 to 30 minutes, even 5 minutes if it’s a “man on the street” interview, talking with me. So the more time they explain background information, the less chance they will provide me with the latest information.
Another unforgettable lesson was my obituary story of a famous anchor. She won America’s Junior Miss when she was young. My understanding was that the title must go before the award, like Miss World, Miss USA, Miss Vietnam, etc. So I wrote “Miss America’s Junior” instead of the right name. And I got a Medill F for a “factual error”. I was trying to explain to my professor that I had never heard about this award before and my understanding was that the title should go first. She was sympathetic, but she could not do anything but suggesting that I should to ask around for such kind of information before I write.
The matter is that I even cannot be aware of the fact that I am wrong, how could I double-check it?
(To be continued...)
Part II: Huhm... studying here is not that bad (OR what you will love on being a journalism student in the U.S.)
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thay đổi nội dung bởi: Kev, 12-15-2009 lúc 02:25 AM
Thoughts of a Master Student in Journalism at a Top US School 
, kiểu này fb của em Hương lại đầy rồi, lol 
