When I entered journalism school, I didn’t expect to enroll in the business journalism track, much less emerge from it a business reporter. Before becoming a journalist, I had been a researcher for a think tank, where I studied city and state government policy. To focus my reporting on that subject area, the Urban Reporting concentration would have been the obvious track.

But I was swayed by the fact that “following the money” had proved increasingly important skill to the stories I reported, and I didn’t know the first thing about how to do it. I also liked the idea of doing something totally different from what I knew. Discussions of finance had previously intimidated me. Rather than trying to narrow my journalistic expertise by learning more about government, I sought to broaden it by taking on business journalism.

As it turned out, I loved business writing. It’s tough, it’s intriguing, and there are as many different subsets of it as there are types of businesses. In the program, I learned how to scour SEC filings for the meaning beyond the numbers; I came to understand the agendas of Wall Street analysts; I learned about concepts as obscure as commercial paper and as broad as supply and demand. Perhaps most importantly, I made the professional contacts necessary to get a foot in the door at a pre-Bloomberg BusinessWeek. I scored a summer internship there. I credit the business program with starting me on a trajectory that directly or indirectly led me to every financial journalism opportunity I’ve had since.

When I tell people I’m studying business journalism, they usually shudder. I think the two words bring to mind line graphs of the stock market, PowerPoint presentations, and pinstripe suits for most people. Then I explain, I’m not going into business, but writing about how it affects our lives.

CUNY offers business journalism classes, not business classes. There’s a big difference. Learning the necessary subject matter through a journalistic lens is more helpful than knowing advanced accounting techniques. For example, understanding inflation, reading a balance sheet, and knowing the difference between a bond yield and price are important. But learning to explain business in a way the average person can understand is the tricky part.

The program trains you to tell a story in a variety of media formats. After a year, you can shoot video, put together an audio slide show, and even code a little bit of Adobe Flash on your WordPress blog. Although you might not use all of these skills in your journalism career, you will have the confidence to know that you could.