What are you doing when you graduate? Taking some time to see the world? Perhaps a few months teaching English in China or Guatemala? NGO work? Communications? How many of you will be hitting the pavement, dropping off CVs and practicing your interview skills? Or at least calling the guys you interned for last summer?
For the past month I’ve spent my time interviewing different professionals in the media—editors, senior reporters, scholars—about the challenges facing journalists in exile living in Canada. “Why does nobody hire them?” I ask. “I know some have thick accents but you can barely notice them after a few weeks?” Their response is invariably the same: “They don’t get hired for the same reason nobody is getting hired these days. There are no jobs.”
The first few times you hear it you brush it off. No jobs. That’s nonsense, you think. With some hard work and good recommendations there must be something out there for me. But then you hear it again and again and you start to believe it. What if it’s true? What would I do? What will we all do?
Maybe we’ll all have to become journalists in exile taking whatever positions we can find whether it be as the Vatican reporter for the Sunrise World News in Italy or the metro editor at The Roanoke Times in Virginia. At least I know they’re hiring.