A study of the influences of the Ball State journalism workshops on students selecting journalism for their occupation or vocation

Abstract

Ball State University's 1972 High School Journalism Workshop was its seventh. According to a flyer publicizing the summer program, the workshop is organized to assist high school students in preparing themselves to "serve as useful members of their school publications staffs."Although never expressed in announcements before or after the workshops, another purpose may be to encourage young people to enjoy the task of publishing a high school newspaper, yearbook, literary publication or magazine well enough to develop a desire to further their education and perhaps, even, to pursue journalism as a vocation.According to John W. Click, director of the workshops conducted annually at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and himself a former Ball Stater, there are over 40 journalism workshops each summer appealing to high school students and advisors and to college students and faculty. Most of these workshops are conducted on college campuses throughout the United States where there are more than ample recreational and cultural opportunities available to the workshop participants.These workshops rang from a few days duration to several weeks in length, and though most college campuses during summer months are different than they are from August to May, those attending the workshops have a chance to see what college campus life is like. Since some of the workshops also invite professionals from the media fields to perform as quest lecturers and/or instructors, the workshop participants sometimes have opportunities to see firsthand "how the pros do it."Ball State conducted its third workshop in 1968. Student participants in that particular workshop, for the most part, would be at about the proper age to rank as seniors in college beginning the fall of 1972.Most everyone receives some amount of encouragement when he knows he has contributed to helping someone else achieve a goal or at least to get started towards that goal's achievement. No one before has attempted to measure the accountability or success of the Ball State workshops. It seems a logical question, then, of whether the Ball State workshops were accomplishing as a side benefit the encouraging of young people to further their educations in colleges or universities and, perhaps more importantly, if the Ball State institutes actually had a bearing upon the selection of journalism as a career.By sampling the students of the 1968 workshop instead of a later one, conclusions might be drawn from questions posed to those persons who might be more sure of just what it is they plan to do with their lives. The problem, then, is do the Ball State University journalism workshops influence students in selecting journalism as an occupation or vocation?These findings should be significant in that they will provide directors and staff members of future Hall State workshops with data indicating what past participants have elected to do with the academic guidance they received as a direct result or as a side effect of attending a particular workshop. At the same time, by limiting the subject of the research to an isolated area (Did the workshop participant choose journalism as a vocation specifically because of some influence at the workshop?), future workshop directors and staffers may wish to study further other aspects of influences upon those attending the Ball State sessions.Since the persons interviewed in this study were selected at random, it would have been impossible to have drawn conclusions or to establish scientifically whether the workshops were turning high school journalists to professional media interests prior to the study.