Monday, February 26, 2007

A minor problem

As a journalism major at BU, I need to have a liberal arts concentration. This is logical. I know it's important to get something out of college other than learn how to write. Most people think that you should learn about whatever you want to write about. This is code for "Maybe you should consider Political Science or International Relations" because clearly all news is about the government or the rest of the world. Well, it isn't.

My favorite part of the newspaper is the Arts and Leisure section but sadly BU doesn't offer classes in concert, CD, food, theater or fashion reviewing. What were they thinking? So I quickly move on to other things that interest me like saving the world. I don't have super powers so I suppose informing people about global injustices would be sufficient. Sadly, courses on global injustices aren't offered either, but there is a class on developing countries. Nevertheless, none of these interests lead me to a minor/concentration.

So I decided I would take some introductory courses in my future minor. Computer Science could be very useful for journalism considering most papers are already on the internet, and the thought of actual newspapers hanging around forever is a bit of a joke. Web journalism is becoming the next print journalism, and everyone has to accept it. So if I was a CS minor with a bachelors is journalism think of all the jobs I would be eligible for. People would love me. Yet, my computer science course is just okay. I find that my professor spends most of her time lecturing on current events in technology instead of the text, which I am totally okay with because I think it's interesting but could be easily achieved by reading the paper. Also, my TA has a hard time speaking English, and seems a little clueless about what exactly he supposed to be teaching us. Could I handle three years of classes like "Concepts of Programming Languages" and "Introduction to Analysis of Algorithms?" I'm not totally sure about that.

I'm really interested in my Anthropology class. It doesn't help that my professor is a really great speaker, so maybe I'll end up with a really horrible teacher next semester and decide I hate anthropology. Despite the masses of reading, I find most of them to be interesting. Still, minoring in anthropology seems very impractical. In fact, I scoff at people who have decided to be anthropology majors. What exactly are they going to do with their degree other than proceed to be in school for another ten years and write a couple of books. I mean I would like to write books, but probably not ethnographic books.

So do I proceed along the path of an anthropology minor or computer science minor? Do I minor in something worthless, but interesting, or something hard that would eventually help me get jobs?

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