For many people once exam are over and places are confirmed or gained through clearing, you start to think about what you’ll need. Now generally speaking you can’t and shouldn’t take your entire collection of belongings with you (something that I definitely struggled with!) and often what you’ll need is different to each person and each uni.
Besides the obvious of make sure you take towels, bedding, kitchen stuff etc I thought I’d do a list of things that all Journalism students everywhere should bring with them!
1. Shorthand notepad
In fact you may want to bring more than one of these as you’ll end up bulk buying them to get yourself through the year, with shorthand every morning at 9.
2. Alarm clock
As I just said, shorthand every morning at 9.
3. External hard drive
Whether you’re a broadcast or print student you’ll need to save all of your work from videos you’ve made, or documents with your stories on to submit as a portfolio and nothing is worse than corrupted files at exam time. Take an external hard drive and then you’ll have a back up of all your files. And somewhere to download films to!
4. A copy of Quinn
Right now you’ll have no idea who Quinn is, but if you want to get into court reporting (or any journalism job really) then you’ll need this book. It can be bought from Amazon, and at Staffs you’ll be recommended to buy it anyway.
5. Enthusiasm
Yes it sounds sappy and corny but its true, without enthusiasm for what you are doing you won’t want to get stuck in and with journalism it means you won’t get the grades that you could do. Throw yourself at any opportunity that comes your way!
