This afternoon I found myself on the elliptical next to the president of my college while at the gym. At the time I felt pretty uncomfortable and awkward, since then I've realized that was a missed opportunity.

Professors and working professionals talk about the importance of making connections. They are quick to inform me that it's not what you know, but who you know.

This can be pretty intimidating, I'm working hard in school to acquire the appropriate knowledge to become the best and most productive member of the work force that I can. To be told that in many situations it won't matter what I know is becoming frustrating. Why am I spending time studying if all I need to do is socialize?

This is especially frustrating  when I realize that I am pretty out of my element here at college in Kansas. I've grown up in Texas my entire life and had never lived anywhere else, so leaving what I know to be the best state ever  to come to cold and windy Kansas takes me into an unfamiliar space. If it's all about who you know then I am out of luck because I know no one.

When I step back and really think I realize that you don't have to have the small town connections (much like many students here have) to make yourself  known to people. All it takes is putting yourself out there and working hard and you will get noticed.

Today I realized that while on the elliptical I should have started up a quick conversation with the president. He doesn't know me, but I knew who he was and I should have utilized that to make a connection.

I guess it really is all about who you know, so if you know someone on the elliptical next to you strike up a conversation. You never know when you'll need them.

I've come to grow extremely jealous of other majors lately: business, sports studies, and education majors to name a few.

It's not because of the actual content which they are studying. I've taken classes for those majors previously and the content didn't always relate to or excite me, but it seems as though they kind of have it easy for one reason or another. I enjoy a challenge and I enjoy hard work, but not necessarily exhaustion. (That might have been a bit of a stretch, but really) I look around at my friends school work and wonder how the heck do you never have homework, and where do I sign up for what you're signed up for?

I get a little comfort when I hear those same friends say that they actually haven't learned anything in their time studying. The jealousy creeps back up a little when they tell me they answered 10 questions on a test right but still received a 94, until I realize that coddling won't get them far after graduation.

I think back and realize all that I have learned that actually will help me after I graduate. While I may have only gotten a B on that paper, the concepts I learned through writing the paper and through studying the subject will stick around longer than the remembrance of the grade.

Hard work always pays off in the end.

I have often found myself in a great frustration with my schoolwork. I don't know how many times I've wondered what the point of college is. I mean at the surface it seems that I'm spending thousands of dollars to basically just get a piece of paper after four years which will tell employers that I am capable of learning, yay!

I would be lying if I said I hadn't contemplated making up a school name and designing a nice looking diploma to place in an expensive frame and call it a day. However, I don't possess the computer literacy it would take to pull that off and am too much of a rule follower to actually fake a college degree. With this sad revelation I have concluded that I don't want to be working a minimum wage job that I hate for my entire life, so I'm going to stick college out. Hopefully it will pay off in the future. (I mean this both figuratively and literally)

Once I move past the annoyance with all the work I have to do I realize that I have learned more in my semesters so far at college than I did all four years of high school combined. The things I've studied in college are actual real life stuff that I can use and enjoy. For example, in media writing we are studying microblogging and how social media (twitter) can be used in journalism. This is applicable to my life and to my future unlike the monotonous never ending flow of useless information I learned in high school.

If I can make it through these next three semesters, I will be able to apply all the knowledge I have acquired for more than minimum wage. The plan is to be working a job that challenges and excites me.

The moral of this story is the cliché don't give up. But really, a legitimate degree will be more fulfilling than a photo shopped paper in an expensive frame.

"Journalism can’t be journalism until it’s published.”

So far in my college journey I have studied communication. In my studies I have taken classes on journalism, and really looked deeper into journalism than I ever thought was possible. On the surface it seems that journalism is simply the presentation of facts about an event. I mean that's what we all read in the paper, so that has to be all journalism is, right?

Wrong. Journalism, I have learned, goes so much deeper than facts. There's ethical questions to consider, biases, and much more. In many people's thinking journalism is meant to depict an event as accurately as it happened. This is the traditional print news that men and women across America read while drinking their morning coffee. This is the journalism that has been presented to consumers for the past years.

However, this kind of thinking is becoming increasingly outdated. Many news sources are converting from actual papers to being strictly an online news source. With the social media movement it seems that every post, tweet, and update is journalism. These social media sources are considered journalism under microblogging (posting content in small and concise manners, such as in a tweet).

Because these tweets, updates, and posts are published they absolutely are journalism. I don't believe that something unpublished can be considered journalism. Journalism is meant to be informative and is meant to be read. I think something that is unpublished is a collection of writings, while they may be informative they were not shared. Without being shared they have not served the purpose of journalism, therefore I believe cannot be considered as a piece of journalism.