by Grace Walker
The University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism is introducing a new one-credit course this spring semester.
JOUR328I: Turning Your Journalism Degree into Multiple Career Options will be taught by Andrea Koppel, a former CNN congressional correspondent and a podcaster.
“The purpose of this course is to illustrate to University of Maryland students that their degree, whether they’re a journalism major, a biology major, or a psychology major, is not going to be the tiny house that they’re forced to live in for the rest of their life,” Koppel said. “Instead, it’s the foundation of a professional skyscraper that they’re going to be building over the course of their career with each new job.”
Koppel wants to help students inventory their skills and then show them how those skills align with different job functions.
“I want all Merrill grads, all University of Maryland grads, to be excited about their future and not to feel overwhelmed or stuck,” she said.
The Merrill team was excited about adding this course because they felt it served multiple purposes. According to Josh Madden, the assistant dean of Merrill College, they believed it could help show upperclassmen what their post grad options are like as well as give underclassmen a chance to explore different areas of journalism with the time they have left at Merrill College. JOUR328I will only run for the first seven weeks of the semester, ending on March 12, 2022.
The course is offered as a one-credit course, so it doesn’t satisfy the journalism skills course requirement for journalism majors, because those are required to be three-credit courses.
Madden said one-credit courses can be difficult to fill up because a lot of students only take the time to take their required courses and nothing else. If this course goes well this spring semester, Koppel said she’s interested in continuing to offer it and making it a three-credit course. There’s a potential for opening it up to non-journalism majors in the future, Madden said.
The course is being added as a pilot for the spring to give students more flexibility, Madden said, since this isn’t a required course and not something that they would have to take in their last semester.
“It’s really a course that a student would take if they’re really interested in the topic or if they’re trying to add a course to get to a certain number of credits, or they think maybe they could boost their GPA with it,” Madden said.
Koppel herself didn’t major in journalism, but she believes that a journalism degree provides students with the foundational skills to be able to succeed in many different fields.
“I do think a journalism degree is an incredible degree to have, because it teaches you to write well, it teaches you to research, to dig and get the facts, and to communicate well,” she said. “The most important thing is that you learn critical thinking and you learn to communicate, and that you also learn to work in teams, that you develop empathy and curiosity. All of those soft skills are actually even more valuable to employers in today’s job market.”
Madi Willoughby, a sophomore journalism major, is excited Merrill is offering this class. Although she can’t take it this semester because of a scheduling conflict, she hopes she’ll be able to take it in the future. She said the class will show students that their journalism degree will enable them to do many things they never even thought possible.
“Being a journalism major opens you up to a number of different skills that you don’t expect, and there’s just a lot more out there than you think,” she said. “I really appreciate that Merrill recognizes that not everyone might do exactly journalism, but shows students that their skills are transferable and useful for other things.”
Featured image: Knight Hall will host a new class this spring semester that seeks to help students make use of their journalism degree outside of just the journalism industry. Photo by Joel Lev-Tov.