My summer will officially end at 2:50 p.m. when I go to my first class of my last year in college. With the start of a new year comes a plethora of opportunities—you can anyone you want to be (why yes, I will take that flier to try out for your a cappella group and Bhangra dance troupe!). Fortunately, though, I know I want to be a journalist, and I have spent the past three summers working to ease the transition from student-journalist to professional, paid, real-person, real-job journalist (by the way, my resume and clips pages are all up to date with this summer’s activities).

While they don’t get paid and normally don’t get published by traditional media outlets during the year, student-journalists are still journalists. As Robert Niles of the Knight Digital Media Center points out in his advise for journalism students blog post, the career of a student-journalist has already begun.

His other advice includes:

• Everyone who posts online has the potential to be a journalist. Immediate access to a global publishing medium allows any source to become a breaking news reporter, even if it is only for a fleeting moment.

• Your career is only as strong as your network. Networking has taken a digital turn thanks to the rise of social media. Now, you no longer have to have met someone in the flesh to make a professional connection.

• Get passionate about a field and start to master it. Niles recommends turning it into a second major. My second major, for the record, is Spanish—I consider it a tool to hopefully allow me to reach more people and travel across the globe.

• Conduct yourself as a journalist, at all times, and never stop reporting. This goes back to bullet point number one: anything posted online has to potential to be newsworthy to someone else. Journalists by definition are unbiased and open-minded—any hint of bias could come back to become your own personal Kate Moss cocaine scandal.

Niles has other advice centering on how to build your “brand” through a personal website, Twitter and other social media tools. While I enjoy tinkering with social media, I am a reporter and my passion is for reporting, finding stories and doing the legwork to make the writing possible.

Potential stories are often missed because they don’t seem especially newsworthy at first glance. As Jaldeep Katwala, a video journalists for outlets such as the BBC for 25 years, points out, there are a few basic questions reporters can ask themselves when they are out in the field trying to spot a story (or perambulating up to policy journalism and media studies):

• Is it interesting?
• Did you know about it before?
• Does someone want to keep it quiet? (my personal favorite)
• How many people will it affect?
• Is the story difficult to tell?
• Does the story make sense?
• Will it change anything?

I’ll attempt to take this advice to heart in my impending job search and in my positions of sports features editor for The Chronicle and associate editor for Towerview magazine. Have a good year everyone.

Hopefully my Spanish major will take me to other sites as spectacular as La Alhambra, a 14th-century Moorish palace in Granada, Spain.