UC Berkeley Journalism - Program - Mid-Career Training

Professional Development Services

Studying at Berkeley’s J-School offers daily opportunities to work beside and develop relationships with faculty, teaching fellows, and lecturers. The school also regularly hosts workshops, conferences and brown-bag lunches where students can meet and learn from accomplished and well-respected journalists from around the world. Recent visitors to North Gate Hall include: NBC’s Tom Brokaw and broadcast legend Walter Cronkite; Claudia Dreifus of the New York Times Magazine; the Seattle Times Pulitzer Prize winning reporting and editing team Eric Nalder, Deborah Nelson and Alex Tizon; NPR “Fresh Air’s” Terry Gross; and Los Angeles Times editor Michael Parks.

For their own reporting and writing, our students have access to a vast array of traditional and electronic research tools. The J School library receives 30 newspapers, 40 general periodicals and 25 professional journals. The collection also holds more than 3,500 books on print and broadcast journalism and a substantial number of videotapes. Each computer workstation has access to Lexis-Nexis, a vast up-to-the-minute database of news from around the world. And if students can’t find what they need here at North Gate Hall, they can head to the Newspaper Room of Berkeley’s Main Library which receives hundreds of newspapers with back issues in print or on microfiche.

Professional Experience

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

First, students build skills and confidence through J School publications and broadcasts. They have produced the North Gate Observer, our weekly newspaper; several magazine prototypes each spring; the award-winning North Gate Magazine; the Pacific on Asia and Latin America; broadcasts on Berkeley’s student radio station; the California News Service internet news website; CNS News-watch television broadcasts as well as annual magazine-style and theme-based television shows.

Opportunities abound at local publications (for example, the San Francisco Chronicle, Wired and Mother Jones magazines, and dozens of smaller outlets) and network news affiliates as well as in the San Francisco bureaus of national news organizations like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, ABC, CBS and CNN, Reuters and the Associated Press.

Career Services

Our students are equally well supported when the time comes to move into an internship or a job in the field. The Journalism School maintains extensive paper and computer files that combine the best and newest internship and job opportunities from industry newsletters and joblines, internet job listings, and contact databases 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.

Most importantly, we work one-on-one with students. Each year students fill out questionnaires and meet regularly with our career services director to discuss career aspirations and changing interests, and to develop a strategy to achieve those objectives by freelancing, part-time school year internships, a full time summer internship during the summer between the first and second year of the program and finally, a challenging job.

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

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