By Dyer Whitt
Staff Writer

As senior year inches closer and closer to the end, I have shifted much anxiety and stress from choosing which college I want to attend, to the selection of my major.

Deciding on a major is without a doubt a pivotal choice in the journey of your life and with that in mind, I decided to think long and hard about how I was going to go about spending the next four years in college.

To me a standard nine to five job sitting behind a desk is not my cup of tea. I require a more active role in my work where shuffling papers, crunching numbers and bending over backwards for a boss who does not give two hoots about me does not exactly meet that model.

I thought extensively about my options and soon realized that the thought of business, economics and science make me nauseous and that those majors were definitely out of the question. In addition, the most common majors left no room for my creative manner, people skills and passion for writing.

After weighing my options I discovered that journalism undoubtedly fills the shoes of every aspect I am looking for in a major, career and lifestyle.

Upon the selection of my major, I began researching the average salary, accessibility of a job and the overall benefits of being someone that works in the field of reporting and journalism. To my surprise, journalism was given a mediocre reputation in its ability to fulfill the public’s appetite for plausible source of news.

To many, the newspaper is going out of style and does not offer an adequate variety of options of news as the Internet does. With this in mind, jobs in the journalism field are also on the decline, which means immediately out of college I might be out of work.

Journalism is a passion and just like writing it is something that I feel strongly about. With this in mind I think I will look past the negatives and focus on the benefits of the subject.

Although the success of the tangible newspaper may be on the decline, a new generation of journalism is on the rise. Implementing the Internet, websites and blogs, journalism in reality is actually striving to the top to compliment our ever-changing society.

The newspaper does not define journalism, the people do. As long as there are people, there will be news and therefore there will be a public demand for what is happening in the world.

Old school journalists may find it hard to bite the bullet and see that their beloved paper is going out of style, but that does not mean that a new generation cannot intrigue news hungry individuals with a more modern medium of reporting.

I am no longer depressed at the bad mouthing of journalism because the news will always be there and in reality you cannot take away journalism in the sense that people will always have a high demand for information on the world in which they live in.

Majoring in journalism has no longer kept me up at night weighing out the positives and negatives and I have no worries for what the future of this profession holds. From what I can see journalism is not dead, but is on the rise.

I may not have the highest paying profession for my degree and I may not have a steady job after college, but one thing is certain; I will follow my passion for reporting the news and upholding the qualities that make the world of journalism a public necessity.