Journ 1 - do you agree?

I was told that they would try to dissuade me from doing journalism. I was told that because so many people come to Rhodes to do journalism they make the first year hard, they make it uninteresting and they make sure that the numbers are cut. They were right.

It was with a naïve ambition as to the world changing prospects I held with regard to my future profession that I filled out ‘B Journ’. To me the provided space of the university application sheet held a promise. Not only a promise for my distant future, but a promise to study a degree that I was tailor made for. It was with a full heart and a near romanticised flare that I submitted this application, marred with the attached aspiration of a seemingly untiring reservoir of idealistic ambitions. I maintained that because I was passionate enough, and that because I had a clear prospect of where I would be in five years time no amount of dissuasion could discourage me enough. I was prepared and I was ready for anything thrown my way.

“I heard first year is a waste of time, is second year any better?”
“God, I hope so”.

On my first night at Rhodes, sometime in mid February, I was provided with a sampler as to what I could expect. Numerous sources validated these sentiments and warned me as to what I was getting myself into. My casual reply to each was that I was just going to have to stick it out till next year. Not even the disparaging opinions that were displayed towards the degree at introductory lectures for other subjects seemed enough to serve as any kind of deterrence for my choice.

Despite these imposed preconceptions I started the year and I tried to do so with a clean slate. It was up to journalism to prove them wrong. This never happened. Lecture attendance became a greater and greater scarcity to the point that two weeks on end could be easily missed in the slightest blink of an eye. The depressing thing however was not that I and many others missed innumerable lectures, but rather that it did not seem to matter. I achieved 73% for my exam without really opening a book, and was not at all celebrated in doing so because I was one of many who had sprung this achievement. The problem therefore seemed to become not that there was too much work, but that the work was inconsequential.

As much as I cannot claim to have enjoyed working on what seemed like an eternity on movie reviews, Soapies and news predictions, it was not the act of working that disillusioned me, but rather the fact that the work seemed pointless. Bar a few assignments and a few lectures here and there it seemed like I was wasting my time, and that I had learned or achieved nothing that I could not have done a year earlier in my schoolboy uniform.

Perhaps if I was an anomaly in my convictions I would be less inclined to crystallize this opinion in the form of this assignment. Unfortunately the truth is that I’m not.

Even though this disposition is shared by many of my peers, up to this point I have dealt with purely individual subjective interpretations of first year journalism. This assignment is useless without an opinion provided for the academic reasoning as to why things are the way they are. This is the opinion part of the piece: The reason why journ appears to be a collection of seemingly pointless assignments coupled with relatively inconsequential lecture attendance is because it often is. This is not at all a comment on the lecturers themselves -this is purely because the course has been designed this way, I believe it would be simplistic to assume that it is accidental. The reasons for this could be many I don’t want to concentrate on venturing too many but it may be to ensure that only the most passionate of aspiring journalists proceed to second year, that only the journalists willing to endure first year have this right. I have been informed that second year is much better, so maybe it is true that you have to be willing to suffer the previously described situation in order to qualify for second year. Be that as it may, I obviously don’t. If it is the true intention of journ to discourage first year students, then it has definitely succeeded.