Check out www.poweringanation.org to see the work of UNC’s fantastic journalism and mass communication students. This study of energy is part of News 21, a project financed through the Carnegie-Knight Journalism Initiative.

Students are creating stories, photos, video, audio and graphics and combining them into multimedia presentations that will be posted to the Web site later this summer. The site is accompanied by a blog and information about the students doing the project in addition to the results of the project.

These innovative projects are being created by 10 UNC students and visiting students from Missouri and Harvard. They are advised by faculty members Laura Ruel and Don Wittekind. Other faculty coaches include experts in writing, photography, video, audio and programming.

In developing this project, we recognized that UNC has an advantage over other schools. While other schools have to use their grant money to hire programmers, we train our own in our visual communication program. That way we can use our grant funds more directly to enhance story and visual collection.

Data from the school’s 2009 senior survey show that students are doing well on the job market! Nearly 75 percent of students responding either had jobs upon graduation or had strong job prospects. Coupled with the traditional rate of 20 percent of seniors who go immediately to graduate school, these numbers indicate that 95 percent of all graduates are moving forward in their chosen fields.

The survey was completed by 173 students for a 48.3 percent return rate, a rate comparable with that of past surveys and greater than average survey returns. Of the 173 students responding, 30.6 percent said they had a job upon graduation. Students who did not have a job upon graduation were asked if they had significant job prospects. Sixty-three percent of those without solid jobs said they had strong job prospects.

This compares to 38 percent last year who had jobs upon graduation and 60 percent of the remainder who had strong job prospects.

For students specializing in advertising, 25 percent had jobs; in electronic journalism, 22 percent; in news-editorial, 42 percent; in public relations, 30 percent; and in visual communication, 28 percent.

For advertising students, 62 percent had strong job prospects; electronic journalism, 55 percent; news-editorial, 52 percent; public relations, 60 percent; and visual communication, 80 percent.

Students responded in roughly the same percentages as they are distributed through the specializations.