Department of History

Studying history is a lot like journalism. You're headed toward a destination and it can be excruciating because you're pulling in all of this information. You're like, "How in the world am I going to fit this, or am I going to expand this?" It's a Rubik's cube of trying to figure out how can I present it in this organized way so my reader is like, "He's brought me an insight that I didn't know before." My name is John Stoll and I am the business columnist for The Wall Street Journal. I graduated from Oakland University in 2000 with a history degree. My job is to basically try to take the biggest business issues going on in corporate America and make them accessible for the weekend reader. The most exciting part of my job is to break the news. To be able to go to your readers and say, "Here's something you didn't know." It's always an adrenaline rush to be the first. The truth is very hard to get at. It takes a lot of research and a lot of conversations with a diverse group of sources and a diverse group of people to really get at what really happened. That's what journalists do. Journalists try to tell you the truth. I'm always using the tools of trying to find the primary sources, trying to find people who were there. I went to Oakland University's history department never thinking that I was going to be a historian or teach history. I wanted to learn how to study and I wanted to learn how to research and I wanted to learn how to make arguments. Now, a lot of people would say, "What are you going to do with a history degree?" You can do a lot with a history degree. You're going to learn a lot about how to classify information, how to find people, how to relate with people and talk to people and empathize, and see the other side of things that maybe you hadn't seen before. You don't have to go anywhere else to get the best history education. You'll get it at Oakland. Because of my history degree, I understand.