Since I’ve been in college, there are a couple things that tend to knock the wind out of my sails (pretty short list, silver lining to follow).
1. I’m sort of homesick. The “sort of” part originates from all the lovely stresses associated with being a college student. The homework assignments, projects, and my weekend job at a restaurant keep me very busy. I guess it’s a good thing that I don’t usually have the time to be homesick. From the time I wake up, it’s running here and running there, and by the time the coffee has worn off, I crash. However, there are those rare nights when I can’t sleep. Those are the nights when I can’t escape it: I’m homesick. I miss my family and my parents annoying yippy dog too.
2. I’m broke. I have accepted this as part of college life, and I’m okay with that. I have resigned myself to the fact that I will be sick of spaghetti and jarred tomato sauce by the time I graduate. But until then, I’ll have a good friend named Prego.
That used to be it.
…But thanks to last Monday’s lecture I have a new addition.
3. Last week’s lecture felt a bit like this:
“The next few years of your life at the Journalism school are going to be downright impossible. But, if in some rare off chance, you somehow make it through the gauntlet without raising a white flag; you’ll graduate. And in best case scenario, find a job that pays you diddly-squat! Then, 6 months later, you’ll get student loan bills and so that you can begin paying back the thousands of dollars you’ve borrowed. So, anyway, do you want to major in broadcast or print journalism?”
Teachers from each journalism department spoke at the lecture. They told us what classes will be like in future semesters, and what kind of jobs we can expect to get with various journalism degrees. Now, I’m pretty sure that they meant well. But, despite their intentions, we all trickled out of the auditorium looking like someone just burst our bubble.
At what point did my bubble burst precisely? That’s a tough one. Well, let me take a look at my notes… The assignments: daunting, the internships: dog-eat-dog, the pace: fast and getting faster, the future of journalism: uncertain. Like I said, it’s difficult to pinpoint at what point among the array of great news I started to feel deflated.
As if the fear wasn’t obvious enough, Professor Rice asked some 300 journalism students for a show of hands: “Who here isn’t scared?” I saw one hand raised, presumably belonging to someone who has either more courage or more ignorance than the rest of us. Either way, its been a few days since the lecture. Thankfully, I feel much better. And guess what? I still want to be a journalist. In fact, I want to be a journalist more now than ever before. Probably because I stumbled across this quote:
“Work to become, not to acquire.” – Elbert Hubbard
Despite anyone’s words of encouragement discouragement, I will fight to become what I want to be. I want to be a journalist. If it wasn’t as challenging as it is, I probably would lose interest in it. I believe that everyone should go after a job that they find fulfilling, and in order to achieve that, we need to do something that we love. For me, that is-and always be- journalism.
On.the.mark 