I spent this past weekend, along with many other Chips (student newspaper at Luther College) staffers, in Minneapolis at the Best of the Midwest Journalism Convention.

While we received great advice from experienced journalists, we were also told the grim realities surrounding careers in journalism, which some of us are pursuing, as newspapers around the country are struggling and businesses are pulling their ads from print.

As an aspiring sports writer, I attended a session featuring the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s high school sports editor Michael Rand. He spoke on the future of sports journalism, and journalism in general, saying we are moving into an age where there are no longer deadlines or guidelines.

With the emergence of online newspapers, Twitter, Facebook and various other social networks, we own our news and opinions for just minutes; anything we post can be re-posted instantly.

There is also more competition. While the number of conventional journalists is declining, there is an increase in freelancers and bloggers.

In this cut-throat world of journalism, writers are armed with more weapons, but the battlefield is getting smaller.

So how do we deal with these changes? Associated Press sports writer Jon Krawczysnki told me one word, “patience.”

While information is traveling faster than ever, we must work harder to meet demands of our prospective jobs, but also wait longer to begin them.

This goes for all careers. Seniors looking for that dream job right out of college need to exercise patience — frustration will only make the search more difficult.

Many of the careers we’ll get haven’t been created yet, or at least refined. As a keynote speaker at the journalism convention told us, there will be jobs for you in journalism, we just don’t know what they’ll be yet.

But we do know that our jobs won’t be as conventional as they’ve been in the past, and neither will the recruitment process. GPAs and honors are being replaced by multi-tasking skills and the ability to work in multiple media formats.

A journalist is now a photographer, videographer, Web designer and social networker.

And the dirty writer look, that’s a thing of the past as journalists speak on camera as often as through their pen.

So become familiar with Twitter, blog, create an online résumé and make your first and last name a domain name online. Learn to write, photograph, create video and write HTML code, but most importantly, be realistic, because we’re all going to do great things in time.

Albert Lea native Andrew Dyrdal is the sports editor at the Luther College Chips student newspaper in Decorah, Iowa.