All I need to know about life, I didn’t learn in J-school

My journalism professors in college liked to keep it real, sometimes painfully so. The following is just some of the advice I was given during my time in J-school:

1) Journalists are poor. In fact, if you want to make money, pretty much any degree-based career choice is more lucrative.
2) Speaking of college degrees, you don’t need one. Yeah, that’s right the people getting paid to teach me were telling me that I didn’t need the education I was getting.
3) If you get good grades, no one will want to hire you. The logic here being that if you had time to pull all A’s then you weren’t doing enough actual journalism (interning, writing for the college paper, etc)
4) Whatever you do, don’t go to grad school. This came from my favorite professor, she held a PHD in Journalism and said that going to grad school for journalism was a waste of time.
5) Newsrooms are pretty laid back places, and journalists are notorious for their lack of fashion sense.

Were they right? Well kind of. If you believe the New York Times Style section (and you also believe the definition of journalist is white middle aged man who works at Vogue) then my professors were waaaaay off. These dudes are balling! ($5,000 outfit? Well that dispels #5!)
(one such journalist is pictured above- hey buddy, nice shoes..)

If however, you are more a fan of reality, then my professors were right on the (lack of) money. Even payscale.com is thinks we make more than we do

As for the degree and grades, again kind of. I doubt my A’s ever got me a job, but I’m sure they didn’t hurt, and as for the journalism degree, it’s true that a lot of the journalists and editors I’ve meant didn’t major in journalism, but I’ve never regretted learning about AP style or practicing reporting by being forced to go to court.

Finally, are newsrooms laid back? In my experience, no more than anywhere else. True, I can wear jeans to work at the magazine now, but I could wear jeans when I worked at a mortgage company and those people aren’t really known to be cool. In fact the EIC of one of the newspapers I briefly worked at in Michigan forced the men to wear ties and the women to wear pantyhose. So it really depends. Although, this piece about newsroom swearing is amusing.

Oh and grad school? I’ve been thinking about it for a few years now.