Career Planning

Professional Experience

To work in journalism, students need professional experience. One of the solid benefits of Berkeley’s two-year program is our students’ unmatched opportunities to get hands-on experience both inside and outside the classroom--covering news and developing enterprise projects for their courses and for individual and group projects, and producing freelance work as reporters or interns for scores of media outlets in the Bay Area and nationally.

 

Students first build skills and confidence through the J‑School’s own publications and broadcasts. In the fall of their first year, students learn the basics of reporting while contributing to Richmond Confidential and Oakland North, the School’s hyperlocal websites, and creating specialized content for the topical reporting classes. Later, they write long-form articles for Brink magazine; they produce broadcasts for Berkeley’s student radio station, and they develop magazine-style and theme-based television shows that are showcased throughout each semester and welcomed by web-based sites and broadcasters with whom the School has collaborative relations.

 

Opportunities abound at local news operations, startups, network affiliates, and national news organizations--among them the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Al Jazeera America and the Associated Press.

 

Career Services

Our students are well supported when the time comes to plan their moves to internships or jobs in the field. The J‑School maintains an extensive database of the best and newest internship and job opportunities, drawn from industry newsletters, Internet job listings, and contact lists in print, broadcast and new media. We cull the most interesting prospects and distribute them to students in frequent e-mail bulletins and a weekly internal newsletter. What’s more, individual faculty make it a point of pride to keep their own networks fresh and vibrant, and routinely link students to promising opportunities.

 

Most important, we work one-on-one with students. Students fill out questionnaires and meet regularly with our career services director to discuss their aspirations and changing interests, and to develop a strategy to achieve those objectives through freelancing, part-time school year internships, full-time summer internships between the first and second years of the program and finally, a rewarding job--or a demanding startup opportunity--in the the media workforce.

 

We offer seminars to prepare students for interviewing, writing CVs and cover letters, clip selection, job-hunting strategies and making the most of their first internships or jobs. Each year, more than 50 print, broadcast and new media organizations send representatives to Berkeley to recruit and interview our students.

 

Our commitment to students doesn’t end at graduation. We are now developing a comprehensive career resources program for students and alumni, so that we can provide long-term alumni career services. At the same time, we value and cultivate relationships with graduates who can serve as mentors and contacts for our students.