Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Journalistic experiences and career aspirations

My name is Sharon Carpenter and I am 22 years old. I grew up in River Vale, NJ (North Jersey) and I still reside there. I live there with both parents and a younger brother. I graduated from Pascack Valley High School in 2004 and continued my education here at Rowan University. Snowboarding, the NY Yankees, I Love Lucy, and people are my passions in life.
My journalism interest started when I realized that I had a passion for writing. I love to write, but tell stories that are true. That led me to the path of journalism.
I started out as a public relations major, but I didn't enjoy sugar coating everything. I enjoyed reporting and interpreting the truth to the public. I decided that journalism may be the path that would allow me to pursue an interest like this one.
At first I wanted to be a sports journalist. My ideal goal was to work for ESPN and write either on their online journals or their magazine. As I began to take more and more journalism classes I found that I didn't want to be limited to strictly sports.
Unfortunately, as I took more and more classes in journalism and gained more writing experience, I found out that journalism was not something I wanted pursue in the future. My career aspirations changed to something more along the lines of human resources. I found out, through conducting so many interviews in journalism, that I realized that I wanted to be on the other side of the interviewing.
I have had the opportunity to write for The Whit. This has been a great experience to write for a college crowd. I have also experienced a taste of broadcast journalism at Studio News, which is an internal news company run by the Walt Disney World company. I got to experience what broadcast journalism is comprised of and shadow the staff that worked for them. I enjoyed the broadcast side of journalism more than the print side, but it was confirmed that journalism would not be my career.
Journalism has taught me a lot about writing. I learned the right way to write clearly, but not too verbose. My grammar has improved even in my speech. I do not regret majoring in journalism because it has taught me exactly what I want to do later on in my life.
Although my career aspirations changed, I learned a lot from my journalistic experiences and it was those experiences that formed my opinions today.