With the Journalism department changing their name and adding a marketing section this fall a question was raised on how to fix and improve it with a new person taking over as the chairperson. I’m no longer a student in the department and I’m graduating this year but I still have lots to suggest. First, whoever takes over this department needs to look at the high attrition rate numbers and think of ways to improve it as many students including myself have left the department. I have seen people that I took classes with from freshmen year through junior year who have switched majors or even switched schools. They should focus on what makes other departments successful and why they have low attrition rates.
The new chair should constantly evaluate their current staff as well as any future staff members as some can be very good at what they do in the field, but sometimes that doesn’t translate into their being an effective teacher or an adviser for the students.
They also need to define what the Journalism part of the department really is. Currently their major concern or focus is for print for newspapers or magazines when print is a dying format. The department should let the students who want to do broadcasting be a part of the television department since that’s where they take their classes. They need to establish that broadcasting and print are separate entities and that you should have a broadcast writing class like the reporting classes that you can take instead. Also, you shouldn’t have to go through so many hoops just to get the broadcasting classes where you can actually be on camera. For someone with broadcasting experience in high school who learned how to do everything in a broadcast as well as how to write a broadcast, there should be a test you can take to prove your experience so you don’t have to take all of the classes once again which would just be a repeat for you.
One thing I would like to see when I leave this school is that they have available for future students a real sports broadcasting degree template. A template that would tell you the general education classes to take in order to graduate and those would be the ones you only take. It would also tell you the electives or sports classes in each department in the school you should take. It should incorporate the television, journalism and radio classes you would need. Also, that you would need to take sportscasting, sports play by play, and all the required radio courses to be on the radio station to first do the sports updates, then gradually get to host your own sports show. In addition to the required sports reporting classes and the multimedia sports courses there should be a new broadcasting class solely about sports broadcasting for television.
The final thing is to make the communication between the college adviser, faculty adviser, and secretary with the student all be in sync with one another. They need to match up the right faculty adviser with the student regardless if the student is in print, magazine, broadcast, or photo.