The Master's Project
A description of the capstone project for students in the M.S. program.
The master’s project is a core requirement for Master of Science students at Columbia Journalism School; students must satisfactorily complete this in order to graduate. It’s their capstone, but it isn’t a thesis in the traditional academic sense; rather, think of it as an in-depth exploration of a topic as a journalist would pursue it.
Master’s projects can take a variety of forms, some of them incorporating elements from more than one medium: text, photo, audio, video, data. During the balloting process, we asked advisors to specify whether they wanted to work with students only on text projects, or whether they were willing to allow students to incorporate multimedia.
Students are aware of this when balloting for their advisors, so if you identified yourself as a text-only advisor, your advisees (presumably) know that they’ll be working only in text. We also tell them that advisors who say they are willing to allow multimedia elements in projects are able to advise all-text projects, so if you’re in the multimedia category, some of your students may still want to do all-text projects, and that’s fine. We only ask that, if you identified as someone who is open to multimedia, you be supportive of students’ efforts in that regard (more on this below).
As a master’s advisor, you’ll assume the role of an editor, helping your advisees to come up with appropriate story ideas, figure out their reporting strategies -- who to talk to, what to ask, and how to navigate the roadblocks that invariably come up. Later in the process you’ll help them to structure the story, and you’ll edit it.
The project will span both semesters. In the fall, most of the work will be figuring out a topic and reporting strategy. In the spring, it is likely to involve structuring and editing the story itself.
In the early part of the process, we encourage you to conduct group sessions with your advisees (if you have more than one), to discuss the differences between an idea and a story, to guide reporting and research beyond the obvious, and to help young reporters use their time wisely. Your students have had a basic reporting class, and will soon be beginning a writing class, but the master’s project is still likely to be the biggest piece they’ve ever tackled, and many of them will have no idea just how much work it entails. Group meetings are efficient for you, but also give students a place to share reporting dilemmas and writing challenges that everyone can learn from.
We recommend that you meet with your advisees at least once every two weeks during the fall semester -- more often is fine -- and that you touch base with them during the “off” week to make sure they’re continuing to work on the projects. Students have heavy workloads during their 10 months here, and tend to backburner things that have longer deadlines, thinking they can catch up later and living to regret it.
Once students have identified story ideas and are busy reporting them, you may find that individual conferences are more effective -- if so, that is fine; however, please note that students want and need face-to-face meetings, rather than conferences by phone or email.
One of the biggest complaints that we get from students is about advisors who are incommunicado.
During the fall semester, Friday afternoons after 4:00 p.m. are set aside for work on the Master’s Project, so this is a good time to schedule your initial meeting(s), but if you and your advisees come up with another time that works for all of you, feel free to meet then. Just make sure, however, that your advisees aren’t shaving time from their regularly scheduled classes to meet with you -- it tends not to go over well with their instructors!
You can meet with your advisees at the school, in your workplace, or in another public place such as a coffee shop; however, please don’t meet with them at your home.
We also ask that you consider travel time when setting a place to meet with students; we got many complaints about the advisor (no longer with us) who required students to travel from campus to the far reaches of an outer borough for meetings. A simple solution, if you’re in Brooklyn and the student is in Morningside Heights, would be to select a meeting place somewhere in the middle.
If you have only a couple of advisees, you can meet with your students in our Stabile Student Center on the lobby level. Those with larger groups may wish to reserve a room. To do this, send an email to Debra Jackson at [email protected], and put “Master’s Project room request” in the subject line. If possible, please request a room at least 24 hours in advance to give her time to figure out what’s available.
It’s not unusual for students to pitch as a project topic a story they’ve worked on in another class. This is okay as long as the student clears it with you and with the other instructor first. However, the story they’re pitching to you should significantly advance the piece they did for the other class, and the original piece can’t just be pasted wholesale into the project. There has to be original reporting – a lot of it. If a student pitches a story to you that s/he’s done for another class, it’s a good idea to have her/him email the original prof, with a cc to you, and ask for permission.
Also when approving topics, please be sure that the bulk of the reporting can be conducted in and around New York City. Requests to travel any distance requires instructor approval; before granting it, please run it by either George Miller or Melanie Huff. This is because work on the project will be ongoing throughout the fall and spring term, and interview subjects should be easily accessible. International travel requires university signoff.
Note: Students can apply to the Dean of Students Office for small grants -- emphasis on “small”; think “train ticket to Long Island,” not “plane ticket to LA” -- to underwrite bits of their reporting.
In the past, we’ve had very locked-in formats for projects. In the 2017-18 master’s revamp, the faculty agreed that such rigid formats did not serve the students, who are eager to try different ways of telling stories, and will be heading into a media world that demands it. During the balloting process, we asked you to self-identify as a text advisor or a “multimedia” advisor, the latter meaning that you would be supportive of students using multimedia elements to help tell their stories. You won’t have to advise the multimedia elements -- a panel of photo, data and video advisors will hold office hours, and students can seek them out for help with any multimedia elements they wish to include. However, we do request that, if you identified yourself as an advisor who is open to multimedia, you be supportive of students’ efforts to incorporate it. We will provide a list of multimedia advisors and their office hours during the fall semester, and will also provide some samples of stories in which multimedia and text are combined in stories.
Note: Students are told at balloting that all multimedia projects contained a significant text element -- that is, they don’t have the option of balloting for you and then doing a project that is entirely done in video. (That’s what our documentary concentration is for.)
A list of all sources and contact information should accompany the final draft, to allow instructors time to conduct a random check of the story's veracity.
The Master’s Project is a 6-credit course which spans both semesters. All advisers must use the on-line grading system to submit a pass/fail grade for each advisee at the end of each semester. You must use your Columbia email account to access the grading system; the Dean of Students’ office will send all relevant messages to that account.
We also ask you to write a narrative evaluation of each student’s performance on the project, elaborating on his or her strengths and weaknesses. Samples of narrative evaluations can be found here and here.
Story selection: Add rigor to the story selection process by requiring students to generate and explore more than one story idea and test them through initial reporting to narrow down which is the most viable.
- Provide a model: Help students conceptualize what they are supposed to be producing by requiring them to choose a “model” for the story they wish to do at the beginning of the process: something already published that the student and instructor feel represents a reasonable goal.
- · Review other Projects: Some advisers distribute copies of exemplary Master’s Projects to their advisees as a useful teaching tool. Many faculty members keep copies of favorite submissions from previous years, so feel free to ask your colleagues or come to me for reading suggestions.
- · The last five years of Master’s Projects are kept in the Journalism Library, and can be searched by author and year here.
- · Perspective: In its scope and duration, the Master's Project is a student's most sustained effort of the year. In terms of relative importance, credits and priority, however, it should be kept in proper perspective with the rest of the curriculum.
Finally, we hope you will enjoy the experience of being an adviser. The Master’s Project is one of the most meaningful and formative intellectual endeavors for our students during their time at the Journalism School. We are delighted that you will be part of it.
Students will submit three copies of their project. Details about submissions and guidelines are here.