tom foolery

Satisfaction guaranteed, unless you are talking about your education. At 26, when most college graduates are trying to advance in their careers, I find myself trying to start over trying to find mine.

While I admittedly flip-flopped majors several times during my first stint as an undergrad, my love for the journalism won out and in 2005 I earned a Bachelor's of Science of Journalism degree in Advertising, with a [more than] minor concentration in English. I'd like to say my time as an Advertising student left me ready to face the world and the industry I loved, but regrettably I cannot. I could feel the churning sense of forced transitions as I finalized my major choice and began weaving myself tightly into the J-School curriculum, and unfortunately I feel it is the students who got the short end of the stick during this time. My work in Advertising Production at the Daily Athenaeum left me more prepared than the "education" that left me unable to repay my student loans.

Many of the professors I had are no longer with the school, and honestly I don't see that as a bad thing. I can honestly and undoubtedly say that no instructor I had held any passion for the creative design I found to be such an integral part of the advertising world.

Without print ads, sure there is a lot less junk mail, but there are also fewer newspapers and magazines that will be able to swallow that lost revenue, no billboards, basically nothing but text. I remember one day when I was nearing graduation, I asked my advisor (who I believe held statistics, numbers, ratings and all the crap I despised very dear to his heart) what was out there for me if I was to remain in West Virginia after graduating. He never did really give me an answer, and that is because the program (at that time, hopefully it has improved in this respect) was not geared towards keeping students in the state, but instead fueling their necessity to head to a metropolitan area where they would work in a giant advertising conglomerate leaving all that creative mumbo-jumbo to someone else.

I have applied for countless jobs in the area, only to be told the position was being filled by a graphic designer. It never gets any easier hearing that, as it is salt in a wound – that I spent the better part of my early 20s trying to earn a degree that should have given me the option to learn the creative side of the business, including industry software. I was very thankful to have my position with the Daily Athenaeum that gave me the hands on experience I should have received as part of my curriculum. Much of the time, the work I am able to do now in interviews is thanks to my training with Quark and Adobe programs that I was being paid for in college, rather than what I was paying for.

I'm sure my new degree in Human Nutrition and Foods will lend itself much better to a career in my area, and not necessarily just because of more opportunity, and I'm sure I'll be just as happy as I would have been if I was working at an agency or newspaper. What leaves me livid is the fact that due to a shoddy curriculum and lackluster professors stuck in the 1980s boy's club advertising world, I am having to take out more student loans to get a degree that will actually help me pay them off.