Journalism and Mass Communication

Grace is an amazing and truly talented girl.

I have seen a lot of her on Youtube and am impressed by her poise, her elegance, her wittiness, the way she carries herself, and the maturity she exhibits on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Such a rare talent cannot be measured with the normal standards of GPA and SAT in college applications. Her potential is unlimited, and if she is lucky (or shall I say if the school is lucky) she may be able to get into some Ivies and other top schools.

Some on this board advise her to apply to journalism schools but I have have a second thought about it.
First of all, journalism is not the same as mass communication, and is totally different from entertainment. The core of journalism is impartial and unsensational reporting and the most challenging part of journalism is investigative journalsim (Wall Street Journal's report on Theranos is a good example). What Grace has done on the Ellen DeGeneres Show thus far is more on the mass communication or entertainment side than on journalism. I am sure Grace can be an outstanding journalist given her excellence in humanities and her unparallelled skills in oral communication, if that is where her passion lies.

However she has to ask herself if she is truly passionate about journalism or her heart is in mass commincation or entertainment. If it is the latter, then the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism is a better fit for her than the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, for an example. True journalism demands a lot of investigating, writing, and editing on the background and it is mostly not glamourous. 

My kid was accepted by Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism last year and what I learned is that the AOs and the interviewer valued the true passion for journalism and the love/ability to write way more than GPA/SAT.

Good luck, Grace!
Be all you can be!