In the face of newsroom cuts and industry-wide belt-tightening, Richard Prince still thinks it’s a good idea to get a journalism degree. In Mediabistro’s latest So What Do You Do? interview, Prince remembers how j-school connections helped him land a gig at New Jersey’s Star-Ledger and Washington Post.

“Primarily, it gives you a leg up in terms of the contacts that you make,” the man behind the Maynard Institute’s “Journal-isms” column explained. “That’s how I got that first job in New Jersey. I was at the Society of Professional Journalists, they were having an induction ceremony, and the editor of the Star-Ledger came to the ceremony. We struck up a conversation, and that started me on the path to that first job. In fact, that’s also how my next job at the Post came about. They had a reporter call the journalism department at NYU and sort of say, ‘Who do you have?’”

Read the full interview in So What Do You Do, Richard Prince, Columnist for the Maynard Institute?