Students to no longer apply to journalism courses

Students no longer need to apply to enroll in journalism courses starting this semester.

The Ferris McGraw Seminars in Journalism, administered by the University’s Council of the Humanities, are taught by distinguished professional writers and journalists and cover topics ranging from magazine writing to investigative reporting. In previous years, students had to submit an application several months prior to the start of each semester to enroll in journalism courses.

“We are always trying to make our courses more accessible, more available to students, and make the process smoother,” Kathleen Crown, executive director of the Council of the Humanities said.

Most courses were very popular and had waitlists, Crown said. However, she explained, sometimes certain places would not be filled up because after going through the application process and submitting a writing sample students would encounter scheduling conflicts.

The problem, she said, would occur especially during the add-drop period, and the change was implemented to ensure interested students would be able to get into the courses. Spaces would open up, but faculty couldn’t easily put somebody else in the course because the application deadline had passed.

“We don’t want to put an arduous process in place that then means that the courses — wonderful courses by our distinguished faculty — are not filling up when they could, so we tried opening the courses to see what would happen,” Crown said.

The change from application to none has shown good results, Crown said. All the classes filled up immediately.

“We are delighted that the courses are so popular and that so many students are interested in taking them,” Crown said.

This new system has brought in a good mix of students from different backgrounds and various class years, Crown said, although the courses are still restricted to sophomores and above.

There are five journalism courses taught this semester, including JRN 445: Accountability Reporting by The Washington Post investigative reporter Joe Stephens. This is Stephens’ second year teaching his course.

Stephens said that as an instructor he needs to come up with a way to make it relevant to every student at every skill level. Although he noted that this task can be challenging, he said it works. He added that all of the seminars are kept at 16 students, so there is a lot of one-on-one time between students and the professor.

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“I find that students that don’t have any journalism background get up to speed really fast,” he added.

D. T. Max, who is teaching JRN 440: The Literature of Fact: Narrative Writing, said that all of his students are strong in their writing regardless of their journalism background and experience. The discontinuation of the application procedure does not seem to have affected much, he added.

“They’re really high quality students,” Max said.

The hope is that opening up journalism courses to all students will make these classes more accessible and simplify the process, Crown said, noting that the journalism classes have had the highest enrollment numbers yet.

“We’ll see how this goes,” she said. “We’re trying this and we want it to work for students, and we’ll see how it works this semester.”

She noted that the fluctuation during add-drop period continues and several courses still have a couple of spaces available.

“We want students at Princeton to have thought about the media, to think about the future of journalism,” Crown said. "The idea is: let’s have a larger conversation. It’s a not a boutique course for a select group of students; it’s open-hearted, grappling with big issues of our time."