“I must really believe somewhere in my heart that I have to have my career before I have anything else.”
Public Radio Fellow
Female, mid-20s
Small New England City
“What I want people to know about public radio and news in general is that from being a consumer of news, you get the impression that news happens and we cover it, but people should know that there is a choice in what news gets told. What it comes down to is every time something happens, there was some sort of relationship and trust that made it so a journalist could be there to listen or watch and report back. One of the most common types of news is crime blotters because police stations make that information public, so it’s easy to be like ‘man shoots dog in western nowhere’ because that’s a regular source of news we can go to. But when you see the coverage of news, I think readers need to ask themselves more, ‘what made it so that somebody was there to report that? Were they getting the facts? How were they getting the facts?’
There’s a part of my job where I’m wondering what I’m spending my time doing, but a lot of it is that things are happening around me all the time, but we really don’t know that much unless we actively look for it.
I think I’m realizing that my job isn’t going to be the magic bullet in my life. I’ve been at war with the fact that I’ve wanted to be a good feminist for a long time. It’s not going to be the thing that makes me happiest. I wanted to care really intensely about my career. But I’ve also recently been wondering— why is it pulling me away from the people that I love and my family? In the two jobs I’ve recently worked, I’ve moved somewhere alone for the job, and all I’ve had at first is the job. And it’s a really lonely time. There’s a lot of privilege in the potential and the exploring, but I’ve noticed that my life is really focused on my career and because of that, I don’t have much else. If I had my boyfriend or my family or my group of steady friends or children where I am right now, I’d have this opportunity to leave work for other priorities. I would have other things to think about. I don’t have hobbies. I have a cool roommate, but I don’t have friends here. I’ve isolated myself. But when all you have is a job and it’s not going well, what else do you have? I’m not trying to get dark here.
Where I wanted to go with this is, I’m not liking my job so far, and it might not even be the best job for me. And then I went out and did this event at the local elementary school where I brought my microphone and taught kids there how to hold the microphone and ask me questions and move the microphone between my mouth and theirs, I left it and I felt really good because I know I’m good with kids and I’m good at all these things that aren’t supposed to be feminist career paths, but I rejected those when I was considering what would be best for me in my career and my life because I wanted to have a “real career.”
When you’re doing long distance with your boyfriend, and I’ve consulted my friends—should I move back east or stay here and do this job? And they’re like ‘don’t move anywhere for a guy’ but I was feeling on a daily basis the struggle that is not only being long distance from your partner but being long distance from everyone in your life. You’d think that’d make it important for me to live in a place where I have community next, but I’ve been so conditioned, and must really believe somewhere in my heart that I have to have my career before I have anything else. Obviously there are certain financial things that you put off until you have a full-time job and a savings account, like ‘I’m not going to go on vacation until I have this much’ or ‘I’m not gonna buy a new bed and bed frame until I am settled,’ but then other things I hadn’t considered I was putting off was getting a gym membership, finding a church—things that tie you to a community or the life that you want to have. I thought that putting these off would be a 3-6 month thing, but now it’s been a two year thing and it starts to change your life and I’m not good at going to church or the gym anyways.
Generationally, we were really sold this whole idea of finding a career we love—and you’ll never work a day in your life. So I took that to an extreme. In high school, I loved theater, I loved it so much. So, I went to theater school. But the education system hadn’t prepared me for theater—which used to be a hobby—becoming my whole life. Then I thought, I’ll pull back on the whole ‘do something you love’ thing and pursue something academic that I love so I started getting a degree in women’s studies. I thought to myself, ‘you’re not gonna have your dream 12-year-old career, you’re gonna have a practical career.’ But I couldn’t apply what I wanted to study—women’s studies— to a career. And then by this point, I was so lost, I thought to myself: I don’t read for fun anymore and I don’t even like reading but I know it will be essential to my life, so I decided to major in English. By that point, it wasn’t a passion and it hadn’t been. I’m sure some people would find that funny—that studying English was a practical thing for me. Then I really focused on how I could make myself marketable and I’d gotten so far away from doing something I love because I realized that I think I felt a little smarter or a little better than a lot of other humanities major because I had ‘been out in the real world’ [during time off from college working retail and in food service] and seen that you can’t get a job with only passion. You need to have some way to be relevant to an employer. I also thought that podcasting was the kind of a career where you can get benefits. Because I came from the competitive mindset of theater and performance, I didn’t realize that other careers were just as competitive. My intention when I left theater was to find something that I could enjoy doing from 9-5 so that I could pursue having a life outside of that. Right now where I am is trying to pursue just having a life that I enjoy and also getting the career part going but it’s taking a lot longer than I thought it would to just create stability.
When I left theater school, I started working [in retail/ food service], and I started to understand the context of how I grew up and became a little more self-aware. I realized that I grew up in a community where they privileged art in a way that the rest of the world wouldn’t. I was told that it was really great that I was a visual artist and that I should go to college for it. People who I know who majored in art are waiting tables. Not to say that that’s a bad thing, but I wasn’t aware of the lifestyle choices that I’d have to make based on a major and I’m still a little bit bitter about that. College is so egalitarian for the most part. You all go to freshman English and you start in the same place and the humanities majors struggle with math and the STEM majors struggle with “History of the Western World” or whatever and it sort of evens out. Back then, we were all just majors in something. People who two years ago were my peers now make $70,000 to $90,000 a year. I guess, you could say on the one hand that that’s not important, right? And it’s not and it is. But it seems so quick and it seems so stark to be peers and then to be in just different worlds and more importantly moving towards very different lifestyles.
I had that wake up call to realize other things wouldn’t be privileged in the real world as well. In my hometown, parents who were all paying lots of money for college talked to each other and said ‘yeah, an English major’s great, you can do anything with that.’ I just got the impression that you go to college and then you can get a job. I think that’s also what colleges are working really hard to sell us and it’s all a rude awakening even to our parents because they have an emotional investment in believing that their kid going to college will set them up—like get them to college, get them through college, and then hands off. But at least in my household, it really hasn’t been that way, but I know for other people it actually has been that way. I really didn’t want to be somebody who landed back living at home again but I also realized that I studied things that set me up to not necessarily be someone to get a job right after graduation. And I didn’t study what I wanted to pursue [podcasting]. Luck plays a big part in it too and I shouldn’t be so dramatic. Part of it is just how things worked out but I think the path I had projected for myself. I had loved that my major could be so wide, but I realized to be the most competitive for a job or internship, I’d have to narrow things before I got to the real world. So I started pushing my courses in the direction of a specific trajectory, which was podcasting. Late in the game, through an internship and a couple of people I had met, I realized that if I had known what I wanted to do sooner, I would’ve taken certain courses, and that my education could not have been just what I wanted to learn, it could’ve been for what I wanted other people to recognize what I know. Somebody told me during college, ‘you should take a news writing class,’ and I said, ‘I don’t want to,’ because I wasn’t really interested in journalism at that point. It really would’ve suited me to know newswriting, but it took a different path for me to learn it. I didn’t get graded on it or lessons or corrections in the same way, and because I didn’t have on my resume, ‘knows newswriting,’ certain doors didn’t open as quickly for me.
I think that the whole passion thing is a thing we were sold and it also makes it so we work harder for less. I was living with this 50-something woman during one of my internships (she was my roommate). She had temped at a public radio station for four years. They need someone to get the content on the air on a daily basis, so they’ll just hire whoever’s available to temp, and then they’ll take forever to actually hire someone and get the funding because it’s a nonprofit. She was a reliable and good person for their job, and she applied for the job listing, but they gave it to this young, eager, fresh-out-of-college person. It would’ve been right to give it to her. She had been doing it for so long and she was a known quantity. But they told her, ‘you just don’t seem very interested in this.’ What I imagine is that there’s a self-flagellating quality of people in our age bracket when it comes to working and getting a job and we’re in a desperate position where it is a privilege to be exploited. I was so upset for so long that I couldn’t get a $12/ hour job in a major expensive city. Because the idea that my success as a person is tied to a position that I care so much about—it changes what work is about. In that scenario, work is not about providing for yourself or for having the life you want to live. Work is about finding a job that you may or may not be underpaid for, but it won’t matter because you care so much about it. In some ways, that’s a good model. And in some ways, that’s the worst model ever. Because you imagine an ideal society where people have enough and people get taken care of with healthcare—if you have a job that you’re passionate about, then maybe you aren’t so worried about climbing the ladder and making more money. If your career and what you do gives you joy, you may not be seeking more and more and more and filling yourself with greed. But on the other hand, if people are taking advantage of your passion for a job and paying you less to fulfill their greed (you know, like the capitalistic way of the world), then like there’s plenty of people out there who are not getting paid enough who are okay with it for a little while because they’re happy to be doing something they love and other people are taking advantage of them.
I don’t know if I’m just not a great example for your blog, but it’s tough. Right now, I know that my work is taking advantage of me. When I talk to others about that or say I’m gonna leave [my fellowship] early even though I know I have more work I could do or it would leave more work for other people, I have no trouble doing that because I know that I’m being taken advantage of right now. But the ideal situation in my mind is what some of my peers are doing, making $40,000 a year. That’s still not great. A lot of industries really rely on passion to attract talent, because what else do they have?”