It’s not a new question.

As a senior in high school and excitable sports editor of The Echo, I remember when I was first presented with it. Being someone who had already decided on future in reporting, though, I remember scoffing at the notion that someone who wanted to be a journalist shouldn’t major in the field. Maybe that works for others, I thought, but I was going to be traditional and get my journalism degree.

Technically, I majored in political communications while at GW’s School of Media and Public Affairs, but that was just a way for me to incorporate some politics into my four-year indefinite stay in the nation’s capital. My focus was always on journalism; so much so that I inadvertently completed all the requirements for a journalism major, but didn’t receive the designation because I would have needed prior approval. I settled for a minor.

I enjoyed my classes, but the few months since undergraduate experience have made it very clear that my majoring in journalism was not only unnecessary, but ill-advised. The reasoning is simple: As a journalism major, you’re taught practices and procedures that might help you learn a little bit about a given story topic when it’s needed. As a something-else-major, you become an expert in a particular field and a confident reporter with sufficient background to wholly tackle a subject area.

The possibilities are many. Major in environmental engineering so you can cover energy policy and green job development. Study business and macroeconomics so you can cover national economic trends and confidently dissect complex financial documents. Become an expert in government bureaucracy or legislative procedure and go work on Capitol Hill. Go to law school (yes, I recognize this would be post-undergrad anyway) to become a legal correspondent. Etc., etc.

Obviously, you’ve still got to develop your chops as a reporter, but that’s something gets taken care of by writing for your campus newspaper or interning. Minoring in journalism or media certainly helps too, but as much as I appreciated my professors, nearly everything I know about journalism came from my experiences and role models at The Hatchet.  Jay Rosen‘s recent comment about his experience in college journalism rings true:

“I rarely went to class. I was learning too much to stop and do that.”

UPDATE: Jay notes in the comments that the courses he didn’t go to were not journalism classes, as there was no journalism school at SUNY-Buffalo. Interestingly, he also points out that at NYU, journalism majors must double major in some other field. Seems like a fantastic compromise, albeit extra-demanding for students looking to jump into internships and side projects, too. Not that being challenged is a problem.

In fact, if you’re going to minor in journalism, ditch the boring classes and take cutting edge courses like Mike Shanahan and Jason Osder’s Online Journalism Workshop (or Convergence in Journalism course) or Jeff Jarvis’ entrepreneurial journalism class. It goes without saying that I’d also recommend studying HTML/CSS and or programming languages (though it need not be a requisite for the journalists of tomorrow.)

Naturally, there could be a number of counter-arguments or caveats to this advice. In particular, one might suggest that a student could major in journalism, but focus his or her extra-curricular time on developing the area-specific knowledge and skills mentioned above. A dedicated educational focus on the subject, however, would likely yield a more organic understanding of the field and be more productive.

Still, I’d love to hear why I’m wrong, so please tell me. For the time being, though, I’ll be looking at MBA programs and other non-journalism master’s programs.

By the way, I majored in journalism. Could you spare a few bucks for graduate tuition?