Open source offers a seamless transition to work

Open source makes a seamless transition from school to work. (This view of my own alma mater, Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, was taken by Bond's Girl in March, and posted on Flickr.)

This isn't just true for programmers, although it's true for them in spades. Programmers can create projects, work with professionals, measure their productivity, and know their value long before they get a diploma, thanks to open source.

It's also true for other professions.

Nowhere is this more true than in business school, where many Internet start-ups have been launched by people while in school or in their first year after graduation.

All the disciplines of modern business, from marketing to operations to support, can be modeled while in school, and their impact on the bottom line measured, so there's no surprise when you get out.

This may be the biggest, and most welcome, change from when I came up 30 years ago. Which leads me back to the picture above.

In the 1970s journalists especially were taught to be divorced from the market. Your job was to work for someone who bought ink by the barrel. If you bought it yourself you were no longer a journalist, but a publisher.

Those days are over. If I could give a j-school student one piece of advice it would be to consider yourself an entrepreneur starting now. Build a specialty, build your credibility, measure your success (or lack of it) with readers. All the tools are there.

The one thing publishers have going for them that you won't find on your desk now is a scaled advertising effort, professionals who can get a high CP/M for those hits you're generating.

And if you can generate an audience, they'll come banging on your door.

So generate the hits now. Create a beat. Gain a reputation. Cover stories in different ways, and see what works for you. Let the market be your teacher and your guide.

As this realization hits more professions, the idea that you can model the job you want, and actually do much of it, before you seek a job, this border between school and work will get fuzzier-and-fuzzier.

Now if we could just get our schools and colleges to realize it.