The way I got in was because I did know someone. I went to middle school with a guy and then ended up reconnecting with him in college. He ended up becoming the newspaper’s Opinion Editor. He knew I could write, and a situation came up where he had to fire a columnist in the middle of the semester over a conflict of interest and he needed a replacement. So he asked me, I submitted an example column, they ran with it, and it just continued from there.

The way the majority of the columnists end up writing for The Diamondback, however, are through two other major pathways: the journalism school and guest columns. Yes, it’s not secret that people in the Journalism major have the necessary connections to become columnists if they have the skills. For the rest of us, the paper publishes a guest column every day. The easiest way for a non-Journalism major to become a regular columnist is to write and submit a few good guest columns, then ask the Opinion Editor if he needs any new staff columnists for the upcoming semester (which he almost always does, because turnover is high).