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I’ve never been very good at being a journalism major.

By the time I declared my major, in the middle of my freshman year, I had gotten out of the habit of watching the news. The media relegated me to the status of a helpless spectator to the actions of the powerful. What did it matter if I watched or not?

Perhaps because of my tendency to tune out the news, I first heard talk of the “War on Terror” becoming a war in Iraq from people around me. “Huh?” I asked. “Didn’t we establish it was al-Qaida that flew jets into our buildings? And isn’t the United States going after bin Laden and company in Afghanistan?”

Where does Saddam Hussein figure in?

He’s evil, they told me. He’s tortured and killed his own people. He might be trying to build chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. He’s broken 16 U.N. resolutions.

And besides, you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.

Still trying to figure out whether I had somehow missed an attack on the United States, I turned on the TV. The news echoed what I had heard people saying, but there were no answers.

Why Saddam? We all knew he was a really, really bad guy, but he was not unique. Plenty of oppressive dictators in the world were trying to acquire weapons. Plenty of countries had broken U.N. resolutions. Why was it Iraq everyone around me worried about?

When did the United States get in the business of preemptive war? Why was declaring war no longer the job of Congress? What did any of this have to do with Sept. 11?

It was the fall of 2002. I was taking a tough news reporting and writing class, designed to weed out those who couldn’t take the heat. So far I was handling the heat just fine.

One week, our lab assignment was to report on a radio address given by the president. A transcript of the speech was online. All we journalists-in-training had to do was pick out some punchy quotes, summarize the rest, grab data from somewhere else and write a good lede.

I read through the speech. Torture and death. U.N. resolutions. These were facts.

Where there were no facts, the address dealt in frightening possibilities. Biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Anthrax. Nerve gas. Threat to national security. Terror. Urgent.

The danger is grave and growing, I read. That would make a good direct quote.

Finally, I understood what was happening in my community and in the world. Where the president didn’t have evidence for reasons to go to war, he insinuated. The media (that would be me, someday) reported what he said. The public took as fact the words it heard in the media. And all around me, America was talking about how Saddam must be removed.

After Sept. 11, the media failed to keep a healthy skepticism of the government for fear of appearing unpatriotic. In a democracy, the responsibility of the press is not only to report the facts to the public but to put them in context. This institution I was training to join did not challenge the administration to justify its assertions; it was merely an echo.

I finished writing, gathered my things and left. Then I walked straight to Schofield and told them I wanted out.

No way was I doing that with my life.

I changed my major back to literature, the same thing I had come in with. I had no particular plans for my future, but I finally found my work satisfying. Critical analysis captured my interest. I lined up an internship in book publishing. I considered never leaving the university at all, just going to graduate school and eventually teaching. That, I decided, would be the life.

But working in my cubicle that summer, I realized commercial publishing was about profits, not content. From my professors, I learned English professorships were so competitive, I’d have to move anywhere in the country there happened to be a job in my specialization. These were not things I wanted.

A year after I had walked away from journalism, I was still in crisis. Would none of these things be acceptable to me? Should I flip through the catalog and choose something at random?

In the end, I decided I would train for journalism, but I would use the critical thinking skills I found essential. I would never, ever be content with “Today the president said…” being the news.

I’m not sure where this will take me. My goal is to work in independent or public media, because operating for profit precludes free and disinterested journalism. Going with the flow probably would make things easier in this competitive field, but that’s not the kind of work I want to do.

I realized when I came back that my consciousness is only allotted one lifetime. I don’t have time not to do this right.