Working on a group project for my Evidence & Inference class last semester, my fellow group members and debated this question for hours. Our assignment asked us to present our journalistic findings for the project on a "landing page" we could share with the rest of the class.

Inevitable jokes about helicopters and harbors arose, until we decided that a plain, old Web site would do fine for our purposes.

Semantics aside, the project offered insight into the range of skill levels my classmates possess when it comes to Web site creation and design. Some of can fluently rattle out html code and maintain their own Web sites and blogs. Others barely know the difference between Flash and Facebook. The former handled the Web component of our assignment, while the latter focused on interviewing and writing.

I find myself falling somewhere in the middle of the group. I garnered most of my Web skills in the workplace, where I learned how to post stories to my publications' Web sites. Still, "posting" consisted mostly of dragging and dropping text and images into a content management system and inserting a few simple HTML tags. I learned how to blog in TypePad, which gave me an understanding of other similar programs like WordPress and Blogger.

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But within a few years my lead began to wane. I found myself 25 years old and amazed at the "young" graduates coming out of school with a plump palette of Web skills I had never formally learned. Part of the reason I returned to school for my master's degree was to gain these skills, and I am apparently not the only one.

Regardless of their current skill level, my classmates seems to agree that those with more Web skills will have an advantage over their peers when we find ourselves back in the job market in a few months. While the M.A. program focuses more on building subject expertise than skill expertise, we all seem intent on getting as much of the latter as possible.

However, the students (especially those lacking the skills) seem far more concerned about getting the nitty-gritty details down than the professors do. As long as we can conceptualize how a story would work online, they say, programmers at the major news organizations that we work for will do the rest. I appreciate the confidence, but what if I do not wind up at a major news organization right away?

I want to be a business reporter when I graduate. Every major business news outlet has an online component, and many appear exclusively online. I am confident that my business education in this program will give me an edge in the job market I am entering, but I think that strong Web skills would set me even further apart.

Of course my interest goes beyond just the hope that such skills will make me more employable in May (although that remains my top motivation). I consume the bulk of my media online, and I find it often represents the best means of reporting and presenting a multifaceted story.

Last semester, I took a five-week new media skills course on top of my regular course load. The course focused mostly on blogging, but I still came away from the class with an improved understanding of how the Internet works and how to add rich content to my stories. I left the class comfortable embedding links and You Tube videos onto sites. But still, I wanted more.

Unfortunately, the strict course schedule leaves little room for formal training. As such, I find myself latching onto classmates who have professional Web experience. I seat myself next to them in the computer labs and pepper them with questions as they deftly maneuver through Java and Dreamweaver. I am hoping to pick up some of their savvy through osmosis.

Our professors say that second semester will include more lab time to orient us with getting our work online, and I am looking forward to that. In the mean time, we presented our landing page at the finish of last semester, and our professors loved it, even without a helicopter.

Beth Braverman is a freelance writer and graduate student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Astoria, N.Y.