Hello!
I’m applying to college (duh), and one of my biggest extracurriculars is that I work as a reporter/writer for my local newspaper. I’d like to make a portfolio of a few of my strongest clips and have them be a part of my application. Is this a worthwhile thing to do?
If so, what is the best way to do it? PDF, website, individual links, etc?
Thank you!
If it were me, I’d link maybe two articles with a brief explanation in the additional info.
If a schools has a place to upload something, then maybe pdf 3-5 pages and that’s it. You don’t want too much.
It will depend on the school - some will allow a submission like this.
If you put in the additional info section but for some want to submit differently where allowed, make sure you delete the additional info section b4 submitting it to that school so you are not duplicating.
Good luck
My D23 put together a journalism portfolio (writing and photography), and my S26 is working on his. Most of the colleges my D applied to accepted the portfolio under optional extra materials. I recall that my D created a website with separate tabs for writing and photography. On each, she posted samples with links, noting which had won awards and such (you have to be selective here, of course, and if you’re writing for a local paper instead of a student paper, you’re not going to have so many awards, so just choose samples of your best work). I think that for each link, she added a short summary of what the article/photo was about and why she chose it. I’m not sure how many articles she included, but I think it was in the neighborhood of 8-10, with around the same number of photos (the photos were journalistic but separate from the articles she used).
Some schools wanted pdfs instead of links, and for those, she made a shorter portfolio, and included information about awards but didn’t do the brief write-ups to accompany the articles. She did include a link to her journalism website.
I think nearly every school she applied to allowed a submission like this, and she treated it as comparable to an arts portfolio.
Do you plan to major in journalism ? (Northwestern Medill or U Missouri or ASU Cronkite for example).
If yes, such a portfolio may be expected or required.