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Bartering brains for bread
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Confessions of a stair mistress
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While other students scarf chips, sling back beers and study, a growing tribe of compulsive exercisers pursues the perfect workout
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Crisis in English
By Christopher Shea
When the Modern Language Association convenes this year, highbrow literary questions will take a back seat to a thorny debate about the ongoing dearth of jobs
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Zen and the art of employee maintenance
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What is the sound of one hand filing? Or, can the Buddha help the temp workers of the world?
(12/23/98)

The Marxist Wall Street couldn't ignore
By Annalee Newitz
How did an English doctoral dropout like Doug Henwood become the first anti-capitalist pundit for the CNN crowd?
(12/21/98)

BROWSE THE
IVORY TOWER CAREER
ARCHIVE

BY LEA ASCHKENAS

Although it was a year and a half ago, I still remember in full detail the excitement, and subsequent confusion, I felt when a professor from Missouri's Graduate School of Journalism called to offer me a full-tuition grant and then, in the same breath, attempted to dissuade me from accepting it.

Missouri's program was ranked No. 1 by U.S. News & World Report that year, and with this grant, I would get to work with the school's renowned investigative reporting division.

"Congratulations. We've chosen you," the professor, whom I'll call Thomas, said on that fateful afternoon in mid-May. He then asked if I could hold a moment while he shut his office door. When he returned to the phone, his voice was barely a whisper and he said, "But if I were you, I'd really think hard about your decision to come here."

I asked him why he came and why he stayed on if he felt this way. He told me that he went to journalism school at Missouri because he was rejected from all the MFA programs he'd applied to. I had also applied to creative writing programs and been rejected.

"It's easy to just pass through here in a daze," he told me. "And by the time I graduated, journalism was all I knew how to do."

At the same time that the school offered him a position in its investigative reporting division, Thomas heard from a friend in the Peace Corps that the corps was looking to train volunteers as beekeepers in Africa. Thomas knew next to nothing about bees.

"But these were my only two options," he told me. "And I had to ask myself, did I want to be a beekeeper or a journalist? I thought it over for a week, and I decided I wanted to be a beekeeper."

But Thomas was rejected by the Peace Corps. So he returned to Missouri.

"Don't end up here by default," he said.

Today Thomas' story still haunts me because, although I never considered beekeeping, I know that journalism wasn't my first choice either. It was the practical choice, but really I dreamed of living in a cabin in the mountains and writing poetry.

"But wouldn't all the writing I'd do in journalism school help with my creative writing and my writing in general?" I asked Thomas when he finished his story.

"No," he said solemnly. "If you come here, stay out of the newsroom. It kills every creative bone in you."

I ignored Thomas' warning and my own intuition because, after two years of poorly paid internships and sporadic freelance assignments, I wanted to believe that there was a set path, a syllabus I could work my way through, that would land me in a fulfilling journalism career.

In the end, I chose UC-Berkeley because it seemed the least traditional program of the three I'd applied to and been accepted at. I chose Berkeley because it required writing samples, and there was no newswriting test.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Is journalism school necessary for anyone?