1) As a journalism major, I am constantly pursuing story ideas. This semester I am in a course which requires me to get stories published with WUFT News, UF's news outlet run in the College of Journalism and Communications. The level of difficulty is increased in this course due to the fact that our story ideas must be news in a certain county or zip code. My initial story ideas were not on par and I experienced failure right off the bat, even considering I put in a ton of effort to come up with them. I had to go back to the drawing board in efforts to actually produce a newsworthy story after failing with my first round of ideas.
2) After this, I didn't have much time to turnaround and produce quality story ideas, however, I knew it was what I had to do. Thus, I had to start from scratch and approach my assignment and potential stories from a fresh, different perspective. I started looking for stories in other places and changing my approach to finding news central to the area and outlet. This taught me that oftentimes I need to step back, change my approach to something and think outside of the box in order to produce the most quality outcome.
3) Failure, for me, is particularly difficult. As someone with a hard work ethic who applies a lot of pressure on myself, failure can feel, at times, like I am falling apart. However, as emotionally stressful as this failure is, it often subsides and creates a fire under me to retry whatever I failed at and exceed the established expectation. This portion of failure is rewarding and the upside to being so emotionally prone to failure. For me, nothing can be more motivating the urge to redeem myself or not fail again or even to not fail in the first place, but this wouldn't have been my mindset had I not experienced so many important failures.
Hi, Rachel! I have a couple of friends who are in the J school, and I think they've mentioned experiencing the same feeling of failure. If it's any consolation, it seems like you're not alone in that struggle. You live and you learn, and it's great to hear that with these failures you were able to produce more quality news articles.
ReplyDeleteHey Rachel! I am in the Journalism school as well and I have heard this from friends as well when it comes to WUFT. It was impressive that you were able to quickly see the situation and what the most efficient way to quickly get back on track. Even if it was a failure, you took it like a champ and have a strong mentality to be able to persevere. I wish I was able to have that same mental strength to keep pushing.
ReplyDeleteHey Rachel,
ReplyDeleteI do not really know how to relate to not being able to get good stories for a journalism class, but I do understand getting what you may think is going to be great idea for a large project, only to see it be a dead end or just not be as fruitful as you hoped it would be. I also understand that once you do that and you need to start over, it can be hard to cram all the work to catch up.