Cristi Hegranes wants to hire someone to fill an entry-level position at the Global Press Journal, but she's having a hard time finding qualified candidates. In "An Open Letter to Journalism Students Who Want Jobs" (here), she explains that she's received applications from graduates who have earned high grades at excellent journalism schools, but the position requires "fact-checking and other newsroom tasks" and apparently many of the applicants couldn't be bothered to check the correct spelling of Global Press Journal or of Cristi Hegranes.
"I just had flashbacks to my own J-school classes at NYU when students
would automatically fail Professor Blood’s class for misspelling
Giuliani," she explains, and while I never had a professor named Blood, I recall profs who could draw blood simply by glaring at a misspelled name in a news story.
In unrelated news, an 18-year-old in Florida has been arrested for practicing medicine without a license (here). He looks like someone who plays a doctor on TV, but his publicity material screams Quack: "I utilize physiological, psychological, and mechanical methods, such as air, water, light, heat, earth, phototherapy, food and herb therapy, psychotherapy, electrotherapy, physiotherapy, minor and orificial surgery, mechanotherapy," and on and on.
And then there's the protagonist of Don DeLillo's story "Sine Cosine Tangent" in the current New Yorker (here), who transforms himself from a young man determined to make his mark the world to an adult devoted to self-erasure: "In the end, I followed the course that suited me. Cross-stream pricing
consultant. Implementation analyst—clustered and non-clustered
environments. These jobs were swallowed up by the words that described
them. The job title was the job. The job looked back at me from the
monitors on the desk where I absorbed my situation, in full command of
the fact that this was where I belonged."
Given current crises in higher education, it's good to know that we have options!
3 comments:
Wow, all sorts of alternatives.
I think, in all seriousness, if I had to quit teaching, I'd take some classes/apprentice myself and learn plumbing, and then move to a warmer climate and find a job as a plumber. Yes, there's disgusting aspects. But also, you're doing something that makes the world better by helping people solve problems (leaks, blockages, etc) or creating (plumbing new areas). And you can pretty much find work anywhere in the US. And then I might think about taking that skill back to the Peace Corps.
I always tell myself "I could have been a welder," but given my klutziness, I would be continually starting accidental fires.
You'll notice I chose plumbing rather than electrician!
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