Two years of surviving all-nighters, damaged video footage, technical malfunctions, newsroom stress and back pain have instilled the confidence that only a journalism student who’s carried a camera and tripod in the pouring rain could have. But going into my last fall semester, I thought I’d feel more prepared for 21^st century journalism. Instead, I felt my degree should come with an asterisk: “If it isn’t the six o’clock news this girl doesn’t know how to do it.”

At each of my internships the past two summers, I had been asked if I could do computer-assisted reporting, write web versions of my stories, post multimedia online through a content management system, and blog and use social media for journalism — all at television stations. None of these skills were covered in the standard, yet important, journalism courses I had taken at UNC: media law, ethics, and print, television and audio reporting, among others.

However, the Reese Felts Digital Newsroom, in its first few months of operation, is a crash course for what it means to be a journalist in the digital space. I’m learning to think in terms of which medium should be used to best tell a story, instead of covering tuition hikes for television news with lots of meaningless close-ups of dollar bills and B-roll of students walking around campus. I’m learning to utilize interactive graphics, audio slideshows, compelling multimedia videos — not always confined to 90 seconds — and to craft text that highlights important information to the scanning but impatient eyeballs roaming the web.

I’m experimenting with crowdsourcing through social media and plugging into the buzz that swirls around digital media trends via blog posts and expert follows on Twitter. I’m navigating WordPress, the typical blog-form content management system that we’re breaking, rebuilding and innovating as an innovative news and information site. And I’ve begun creating a website for owning my name, my brand.

Until this year, such comprehensive training wasn’t available at UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. It still isn’t at many institutions of higher learning. And training isn’t readily available at many legacy media companies, which are struggling with a bad economy, changing audience habits and dwindling staffs.

Initiatives like the Reese Felts Digital News Project are equipping students with the skill sets necessary to compete for available jobs, to help complete the transition in many companies and lead the way in others. Students no longer have to narrowly define themselves with descriptions of their expertise such as, “I do print,” or, “I just do television.”

Classes and programs centered around the digital space should not be journalism school electives — they should be part of a school’s core curriculum. Students should demand it. We’re the generation that grew up with the Internet. This is our space, and we thrive in it.

We know that technology gives us the ability to report anywhere, anytime. We don’t have to worry about downed live feeds. We don’t have to wait for the morning edition.

It’s an exciting time. I feel like I’m 12 again.