What To Do With a B.A. In English

The above title comes from a tune from the Broadway musical "Avenue Q," but it might as well be he story of my life right now.

It's been five of the most tumultuous, life-changing years of my life, and other than actually getting things done earlier, I wouldn't have changed a damn thing.

This work for the journalism minor has been my saving grace and (nearly) my self-inflicted fatal wound. In four, short years, I quickly moved up the ranks from lowly contributor to regular staff writer, eventually to editor-in-chief, and finally as a sort of adviser emeritus. I wrote more than the required two stories a week, became a vocal member of the staff, managed a staff, and eventually in many ways, became the public face of the paper. It wasn’t always the best of circumstances. There was in-fighting, a couple near staff coups, enough blown deadlines to put Ben Bradlee into an early grave, and the never-ending problem with finding enough writers to cover all the things we want and need in a given week. But there were also successes. We successfully took the paper from an absolutely laughing stock on the brink of imminent disaster to a trusted source for information in an age when the campus rumor mill could never be stronger. We achieved some of the legitimacy that we struggled for years to gain, and the paper just became this new force to be reckoned with on the campus scene. We had a newspaper, and it looked and read like a newspaper.

We thought and believed that a dedicated, yet minimal group of writers, editors, photographers could change the world. Well the world, or maybe just the campus landscape. We would be looked at with new eyes, and people would look to us to get their news first. When the chatter moved from laughing at the Torch to rage by its lack of willingness to adhere to the administration’s pleading to avoid the big stories and the PR nightmares, we knew we were on the right track. This is also when my involvement became more and more monomaniacal. It became a poker game I was playing with my life, career, and future. I had a staff of dedicated people, but unlike them I couldn’t balance all the things I wanted to do, with the things I had to do. Then, I took the big step backwards. I had focus on me and do some of my best work in the classes and on the journalism trip to Chicago. Journalism has opened me up to the world in a way that I’ve never been more excited by and terribly scared as well. Never has there ever been more media circulation and never have there been fewer jobs to go around.

I desperately want a career in this industry! I have a voice and a particular nuance to the world that I know I must share. I’d like to go to grad school as well, but I know I need to work for a few years to gain some experience outside of the safe walls of the Torch office. There has to be arbiters of good writing out there in the world because otherwise there are more and more cheap hacks that don’t know what they’re doing and let their personal beliefs spew into the writing like the Ebola virus through the human body. Writing has made me a better person, and I know this is what I have to do. I have to; I don’t know what else I could do in this turkey burger economy.