I am the print managing editor of the Iowa State Daily, which means that I am responsible for getting the print product out every night — and I have no intention of being a journalist.

I plan on majoring in criminal justice and pre-law and then continuing to law school to become a criminal lawyer. So what am I doing managing a newspaper?

When I came to college, I wanted to be a journalist more than anything. I wanted to tell the stories of “the extraordinary ordinary people” of the world, as I called it. I had always seen news as important; news was the way that I could get information in order to form my own opinion on topics and stay informed on things happening around the world.

Pretty soon, I figured out that journalism wasn’t for me. I wasn’t good at walking up to people I didn’t know and asking them questions that they didn’t want to answer, and I didn’t like covering meetings. My calling was somewhere else, but I knew that the Daily was still doing good things here on campus, and I still wanted to be involved with it in some way. Just not writing.

No matter your major, your job, or your life path, news is so important. It’s how you get the information that drives your choices. Whether it’s from a newspaper, a radio station or from Twitter, there are more places than ever to get information about the world.

I don’t expect you to blindly agree with every news article you read. Every one is written with the opinions of professionals or with the opinions of those who have opinions on the matter, to give the reader a little more insight on the issue or topic at hand. Read one, two, 10 or 100. Read dissenting articles. Read articles about topics you would ordinarily never be interested in. Use them to form your own opinion. They are there to inform, not to persuade.

I may not be pursuing journalism anymore, but that doesn’t mean that journalism is any less important to me as an editor or a person. Journalism is so much more than just politics and economics. There is so much to learn, for everyone.