Learning on the job
Barely has a moment passed over the last year without thoughts turning to jobs. We are fortunate enough to receive emails from our tutors detailing internships and offers of employment each and every week.
There are, of course, plenty of talented candidates out there who have studied the trade without access to a structured, academic course, but the fact remains that for many organisations, a reputable MA from a reputable university will stand you in good stead for application season (especially when specific skills are required).
Although the Interactive MA at City has undoubtedly made me a far better journalist, the one thing it could not easily prepare me for was working life on my first job. After starting work at ExaroNews.com as a resident data journalist focusing on scraping projects, the sudden gap between what the classroom teaches you and what is required in the professional workplace became apparent.
When it comes to the type of scraping-heavy data journalism I do for Exaro, this disconnect mostly presents itself as the unique challenges that each project throws up. On my first day, I suddenly realised that for my first project, there were no more sanitised, neatly-formatted datasets to work on and no more webpages to scrape with clean, efficient HTML going on behind the scenes. I was on my own.
Instead, I had to rely on the fact that I knew I had the skills to tackle the problem in front of me, even though I wasn't quite sure which ones would do the trick.
I am ultimately glad of this wake-up call, however. My learning curve has increased dramatically, and the confidence I have gained from successful problem-solving along with my colleague, George Arnett, has led to me learn new techniques that I once thought were beyond me.
Undoubtedly, the same will go for anyone coming out of the safe environment of academia and going into the harsher world of results, deadlines that you can't miss and most importantly, complete responsibility for the work you produce.
