I'm going to start this thread off myself, as this is one of the most common questions we get from students.

Firstly, the key is partly in the title - journalism. The majority of people working on architecture titles have qualifications and/or experience in journalism first. The exceptions are those journalists writing architectural criticism or technical features - but I'll come onto those later.

If it is something you are interested in, then the first step is trying to write for your student paper if still at university - any sort of writing counts, from sports to culture - just getting into the discipline of talking to people, fact checking, and pulling it all together is vital.

If pure journalism is the route you want to go down, then it is time to look at taking a NCTJ accredited course, sometimes even a postgraduate course,and looking for work experience and a paying job. There are multiple routes in, which are covered in detail on many sites - one such guide is at journoworld so I won't go into this career route in any more detail.

This obviously leads to a career as a journalist - not necessarily in architectural journalism. For that, you'll need to apply for jobs at the various architecture titles.

The other option is to try and combine architecture and journalism - which is the route that many freelance contributors take. Here people tend to write reviews, rather than news. For this, you need to continue down the architecture career path, but start keeping an eye out for interesting topics you can write on. Are you going to an interesting conference or show? Did somebody say something interesting or controversial at an event? Could you write a brief succinct review of it?

Start trying to write such reviews of pieces – of no more than about 400 words – just for your own practise. Do you still want to work in journalism? If so, when you are happy with your reviews, you can start offering them to magazines, websites – even your school's old website as samples of your writing and offering to write reviews of upcoming events.

Look at what the various titles cover normally, to check what you are pitching to them fits in with the tone of the title. But remember, high profile events will normally be covered by the title using its regular staff, so look at more quirky, or local events.

You are unlikely to be paid until you have a track record of delivering concise, well written pieces.

Journalism isn't an easy route to go down, but it can be a very rewarding career.

Has anyone else got any advice for students looking at it as a careers path?