choices, redux

This time to do with j-school. The timing of which may be appropriate since many of you are considering applications that are due, uh, next month?

Mayka forwarded this post from The Editorialiste that contains many pro/con linx. If you are seriously debating, read them all, especially the post itself. And click on the linx on the linx. and read the comments.

Among the best points by the anonymous author, who indeed went to j-school at Columbia, and who may inspire a deluge of last minute letter of rec requests for yours truly (but whatever...):

"...If there are things you want to do journalistically that you haven't had time to do elsewhere -- write a 3,000-word magazine feature, or craft a book proposal, or spend time practicing at pitching freelance pieces -- j-school is that safety net. It's a safety net made of your tuition dollars, of course, but the way I look at it, those tends of thousands of dollars are you buying yourself time to learn what you didn't know before.

Journalism school might teach you a little, but those who succeed in it are the ones that teach themselves even more. In other words: what you directly learn from classes is 33 percent of your journalism education.

The other 66 percent is getting a freelance pitch accepted or rejected, working all night against deadline, blowing a deadline, misquoting a source, quoting a source correctly and having that person remain unhappy with what they said, blowing past a word limit, being assigned the task of editing your own story, working with another reporter as green as you are on an assignment, and so on. J-school is one or two years of you buying yourself the time to do all of this. You're effectively putting a price tag on that experience, and last time I checked, it can run as high as $65,000."

mayka makes good

Congrats to Mayka Mei (SCU '06), who is now a featured writer on That Minority Thing, a new web community where minority voices can come together -- as well as a filter for news about issues relating to groups often marginalized by the mainstream press. The site launched last week. You can read her first piece here.

Back at SCU, Mayka Mei was Director of the Multicultural Center her junior year and before and after that, a writer and designer for The Santa Clara. She won an award for a piece on clubbing she did for the paper her senior year. She started her latest blog, theMaykazine -- subtited "overthinking so you don't have to"-- a couple months ago. Below, she talks about how a post on her blog led to her current gig: A good lesson on why you should always practice good blog etiquette.

"A few months ago I started my latest blog. (My oldest blog is old enough to enroll in second grade.) Even though I don't have a singular theme for theMaykazine, I discipline myself in writing about my core interests in culture and intercultural relations at least once a week.

After writing "You can't see me!" in response to John Ridley's Huffington Post article "Are Asians the new invisible man?," I received an invitation from Ridley's publicist to contribute to That Minority Thing. It excited me a lot. I didn't expect to be receiving any messages other than silly press releases, and here was an opportunity to contribute to a new media outlet devoting itself to minority issues and minority voices.

TMT just launched officially last week, but I already love the Featured Writers section, where other socially conscientious bloggers like myself have aggregated to examine current events and ongoing issues.

Advice to aspiring bloggers: Always practice good blog etiquette and hotlink your sources."