This fall, my job description included interviewing Anthony Morelli, listening to Joe Paterno crack his normal witticisms toward reporters and spending more time in Beaver Stadium than I did in my apartment.

Sounds like the perfect set up if you're a sports fanatic like me, right? Not so much. This semester after the Outback Bowl, I packed away all my stat sheets, stopped thinking about strength of schedule and left the Collegian sports staff to take a job as the campus chief.

It's a strange move if you consider the fact I had worked on the sports staff for two and a half years and aspired to some day write for ESPN.com. But in my mind, it's a natural move.

To give some context, sports journalists deal with a frustrating stigma -- you're a writer first and a reporter second. The running joke in the journalism circle is that the sports department is the toy department, a necessary evil.

That's painful to hear because, first and foremost, I'm a journalist. Nothing excites me more than news unless it's late-breaking news. And every professional sportswriter -- with the exception of a few hacks -- feels that way, too.

Sportswriters are reporters. It just so happens most of their stories are event-driven. You write a preview, you cover a game and you go to the weekly press conferences. It can become a very routine job -- unless an e-mail message unexpectedly pops into your inbox declaring that linebacker Dan Connor will stay at Penn State.

So, that takes me back to why I made the switch to the campus staff. I've always felt there was something more for me in the journalism world than just basketball game stories and features about red zone offense.

I like chaos. I like it when the newsroom is hectic, though gauging by my usual frazzled appearance at deadline, you'd never know that. And on campus, there's a good bit of that. Because after all, when you have a "student-centered" university that's making decisions arguably for or against the best interest of the students, there's news everywhere.

Though my days of reporting for the Collegian are all but finished, I have an awesome opportunity on the campus staff to help other reporters in their pursuit of news. In just three days, I've found it's just as satisfying to see a campus reporter write a great story as it was for me to pen one myself.

Before the move, the Collegian's editor in chief Erin James told me that I may just end up loving the campus staff. And with the news we've had during these initial days, I've almost forgotten what a touchdown is as I write this column. I guess Erin was right.

As a journalist, I've learned there's no ideal job whether you're a sports reporter or a campus chief. If you're a true journalist, all you need is news to be happy.