The Write Stuff by Rachel Leibrock, MFA ’04

Mills may not have a traditional journalism school, but alums have used their liberal arts degrees and time on the student paper to forge meaningful careers. By Rachel Leibrock, MFA ’04

The Before Heidi Wachter ’01 attended Mills College, she’d never considered becoming a journalist. But when a friend approached her to join the student newspaper (now known as The Campanil), she decided it was worth exploring. “I’d never imagined myself as a journalist,” says Wachter, even though she’d worked on her high school student publication and had also interned at a local newspaper. “But I wanted to learn more things about writing, and what I discovered is that journalism is exactly that.”Write At Mills, Wachter reported on various campus issues, working alongStuff side what she describes as a “skeleton crew” of diverse women. As a women’s studies major and a 27-year-old returning student, she appreciated that many of her peers were also “resumers.” “At the time, I had classmates who were in their 40s and 50s,” Wachter recalls. “I had already worked a job and gone to college for two years, and then dropped out to work a lot of random jobs in advertising and marketing.”

By being part of a small but scrappy staff, Wachter says she gained invaluable skills that have set her apart in the job market more than 20 years after graduation. “I learned photography working on a story because there wasn’t a photographer with me,” says Wachter, who now freelances for various publications, including Experience Life, a health and fitness magazine. “And now everybody [in journalism] is taking their own photographs, and everyone has to learn multimedia.”

Although Mills College may not be considered part of the bigger pantheon of competitive journalism schools such as Northwestern University or Columbia University, many students and alumnae say that the College’s smaller class sizes, focus on intersectional feminism, and rigorous commitment to intellectual discourse gave them a solid education. And time spent in the newsroom at the student paper, no matter its name, can help crystallize the skillset needed to succeed in the larger media landscape.

“One thing that sets Mills apart from other schools is its focus on critical thinking,” Wachter says.

‘I knew how to stand up for myself’

Mills College’s academic journalism program isn’t even technically a program. The subject is offered as a minor, which in many ways is part of its appeal and effectiveness. That’s just one option toward building a journalism career; students representing diverse majors work on The Campanil, often without taking a single journalism course.

Ari FitzGibbon ’22, The Campanil’s editor-in-chief for the spring 2022 semester, is an English literature major who never enrolled in journalism classes.

FitzGibbon, who grew up in Sitka, Alaska, decided to pursue the subject after studying it in middle and high school. Mills interested her, she says, because she wanted to attend a historically women’s college that, in a way, mirrored her small-town upbringing with limited class sizes, but also offered a vibrant LGBTQIA+ community.

Though initially intimidated, she says she came to see the newsroom as a welcoming place for collaboration—even if all but one semester took place during the pandemic that forced pitch meetings and editing sessions to an online format.

In March 2020, at the start of lockdown, The Campanil and many other college publications switched from a print/digital edition to online only. Although the change to remote work was at first “disorganized,” FitzGibbon says, it also offered valuable experience as the staff communicated via video conferencing and other online messaging systems.

“We were able to settle into it over time, and I’m really proud of the content we were able to put out,” she says.

FitzGibbon credits the highly collaborative nature of The Campanil’s staff for those successes. “I enjoy the peer-focused environment we had in the newsroom, and working with people who are often in the same stage of life as you are,” she says. “But there was also a range of people—we worked with both undergraduates and graduate [students].” FitzGibbon, who enjoys arts and entertainment reporting, says she learned about interviewing by reading the work of other Campanil reporters. “It’s something I was always told to do, and now I pass that advice to others,” she says. “When you have a question about some element of an article, go look at a previous example of the [same type of] article.... This has been integral to me in crafting interviews and interview questions.” Unlike FitzGibbon, Rosina Ghebreyesus ’22 took every journalism class possible, but her takeaway is similar. Ghebreyesus, who transferred to Mills as a communication major, says the small class sizes appealed to her. Once on campus, the experience exceeded her expectations.

“It was a real community, everything was discussion-based— it was more about what you as a student were bringing to the table,” Ghebreyesus says.

Likewise, Amy Pyle ’80, now the national investigations editor at USA Today, credits Mills with giving her an edge. Although Pyle never worked on The Campanil, she says her degree in French, as well as the journalism classes she took with the late Peggy Webb, provided her with an essential tool: learning how to learn.

Even with a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern, she emphasizes that her liberal arts degree has been more functionally useful than a specialized degree in the newsrooms where she’s worked.

“When I got my first journalism job, I realized how much more I was relying on what I learned at Mills,” Pyle says. “As journalists, we need to synthesize a whole bunch of information and get up to speed on things we don’t know anything about. You have to be a generalist.”

At Mills, Pyle adds, she learned how to ask questions that could take a story “in unique directions.” She also learned the importance of editing. “Writing was a big part of classes at Mills, and editing your own work was part of it, too,” she says. “There was the emphasis that it’s all about the language, no matter what subject.”

The chance to study at an historic women’s college also provided an advantage, she says. “You can’t undervalue the strength of being at an institution where the editor of the paper is always a woman and the president is always a woman,” Pyle says. “That was empowering.”