You wouldn’t expect a journalist and a doctor to have a lot in common. One investigates local occurrences and reports on them to the public, whereas the other treats the sick and ensures the health of their community in private. But in my three years with The S&B, I have gained a number of skills through my experiences in the paper that have also lent themselves well towards my future aspirations in healthcare.
The most notable of these skills was learning how to translate complex information to a wider audience. In my time as both news and sports editor over the last three years, I’ve edited, written and published nearly 100 articles. From a breakdown of a Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers (UGSDW) proposal to explaining how the College’s endowment works, I’ve seen complicated and lengthy processes and situations be broken down into simple and concise stories, and I’ve seen it done well and done poorly. That same skill in effective communication has proven incredibly useful with my experience in healthcare.
When working in a clinic over a summer, I sometimes had to explain medications, treatments or diagnoses to patients. In these situations, I had to distill more complex concepts into simple terms. It was my experience learning how to effectively communicate with The S&B that allowed me to do this easily.
I also learned the importance of how you convey information and how that affects one’s response to it. I’ve seen how an ambiguous tone, factual errors, a lack of context or a lack of accounting for all perspectives can confuse, bother and even harm readers and subjects, and I’ve learned how to avoid such mistakes. Ensuring clarity and accuracy are even more crucial in healthcare, and my time with The S&B has allowed me to develop the skills needed to ensure the information I am sharing is factually and implicitly correct.
Unexpectedly, The S&B has also taught me to be a better team player and to compromise. Every writer has a different style, and there is more than one way to tell a story correctly. It took some practice to learn how to edit others’ writing without implanting my own voice throughout, but it is an incredibly useful skill to have across disciplines. Compromise is the foundation of teamwork in any context, and that necessitates some level of stepping away from one’s own preferences and methods.
On the other side of that coin, it’s also taught me how to stand up for my beliefs and to ask the difficult questions. On the very first story I wrote with the paper, I was actually yelled at by an administrator for asking the questions I needed to ask. While at the time it just made me incredibly anxious for a few days, it was the first of many times I would be in that situation, and in each case, I got better at standing my ground when it really mattered. That is a hard skill to learn and practice, but The S&B gave me the opportunity to do just that.
These are just some of the skills I have developed while working for The S&B, and each of them, for me, is still important outside of a journalistic context. A majority of our staff do not intend to go into journalism, and I would argue that one of the most rewarding aspects of working for the paper is the wide versatility of the skills we all pick up. Whether their career aspirations lie with completing research at the graduate level or going into the music industry, each staff member has the chance to develop a broad set of skills that will help them with their professional goals.
The S&B is not just providing a service to our readers, but also to our staff, by giving them the opportunity to develop skills that will be valuable in a variety of contexts. At its core, journalism involves the understanding and translation of information and an uncountable number of professional and communication skills. These are skills that a formal education cannot fully teach — they instead require experience and practice. As someone who very likely will never work in journalism after graduation, The S&B has given me the skills, experience and practice I need to excel in my own career of choice.
