<p>I’m 22 years old. I graduated with a bachelor’s in Journalism and Political Science with honors. I’m also proficient in Spanish and close to proficient in Arabic. (I’m still studying it at my leisure.) I’ve been interning for professional newsrooms since I was 16, Editor-in-Chief of high school and college newspapers. I am interested in starting my own media company. The problem is I’m not quite sure of how I want to go about it. What demographic do I want to appeal to? What news do I want to cover? I want to pursue a Masters program for Media Entrepenueurship. Part of me thinks now is a great time to do it before I get to comfortable with one company and am too scared to leave. I also think the sooner you go back to school, the easier it is. And I graduated debt-free so I figure get your Masters, put aside some money for your business before you rack up debt. I hope that won’t happen but I can’t predict the future. However, I feel like I shouldn’t get my Masters until I have a very concrete business plan. I’m not sure it’s useful unless I have a leadership position at a media company or do create a successful business. But my Masters could also help me develop that plan. So I’m torn. What do you think is the best choice- get my Master’s now or wait?</p>
<p>It sounds like you really need some entrepreneurship training and you can get that outside of a formal Masters degree. Look into [The</a> Start-up Owner’s Manual](<a href=“http://www.stevenblank.com/startup_index_qty.html"]The”>http://www.stevenblank.com/startup_index_qty.html) and programs like [url="<a href="http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/i-corps/curriculum.jsp"]I-Corps[/url">http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/i-corps/curriculum.jsp"]I-Corps[/url</a>]. Once you have a good idea for your company, and see the direction you need to go in, you will be able to see if you need a Masters degree and in what area.</p>
<p>^I agree with the above. You don’t need to go to a formal master’s program in order to get entrepreneurship training, and even if you did, you’re not ready yet. I agree that you need to have a more concrete business plan before you go forward, so what you really need to do is do some market research/assessment to figure out what kind of media companies are needed. Where are the gaps in the industry? What niche do you need to fill?</p>
<p>I don’t necessarily think “the sooner you go back, the easier it is”. It really depends on the modality of the education and your personal experiences. Professional degrees often draw a lot upon case studies and lessons learned from the professional world, so it’s entirely possible that some people find it easier to return after getting some experience. For example, in my own field (public health) it’s very common or people to get some work experience before coming back because they use the things they learned to help define their interests and drive the skills they decide to pick up. Before you’ve worked very long, you don’t really know what’s out there and what skills and certifications you need to be taken seriously in your field. Once you have more years of experience, you learn exactly what it is you need to succeed.</p>
<p>The other thing to remember is that you shouldn’t start your own company just for the sake of it. I’m a risk-averse person who has no entrepreneurial spirit whatsoever, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But with that disclaimer aside…companies don’t exist just for the sake of existing; they exist to serve some kind of need or desire or gap in the market. Google started because of a need - people needed a reliable search engine in the early days of the Internet; all of the older ones had bad algorithms, and they took an existing product and improved it. Facebook started more out of leisure-time desires instead of a need; college students wanted to connect to their HS friends who went to other colleges and it took off from there. I think few successful business people just wake up one day and say “I want to start a business” and then go hunting for something to do; rather, I think that they see a need and leverage themselves into the gap. (Or it may be a combination of the two - but there’s got to be some recognition of a hole in the market.)</p>
<p>So your first tasks should be to see if there IS a gap that you can fill in media. Why do you want to start a company? It it because you feel like scientific reporting it bad and you want to provide better coverage of scientific advancement? Is it because you want to start a magazine that offers scholarly analysis of political international crises? Do you want to help media outlets perform assessments that will help them figure out who their readers/consumers are improve their content to better reach those consumers? (That would also be a media company!) Does what you want to do already exist? If so, why start a new company? If you get really comfortable working for someone else, that could be a sign that your niche is already satisfied, which is not a bad thing.</p>