Future-scope
One thing that I have noticed while being home is that EVERYONE seems to know that I am going into my senior year at Albion. Which is nice, knowing that they care enough to keep track. But the downside to that kind of attention is that I’m now getting the college version of the dreaded high school question: What are you going to do with your life?
I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while, but it’s always been in kind of vague terms. You know, I want to work for some sort of paper or online publication, covering some sort of government, ideally heading back to D.C. to do so. There’s no real “how” in those plans, just an end goal.
With the recent barrage of caring and curious questioning that left me looking like a deer in the headlights, I decided that I had better start looking for that elusive how. And here are a few of the venues that I think could work for me.
- Obviously, as I have mentioned in the past, I met a lot of really amazing people in Washington. And those people know a lot of people. So I can start sending out feelers with them and hope that they had heard of something. Yay for networking options.
- The Pleiad advisor and my mentor from D.C. both recommended this site called JournalismJobs. The site is GREAT–it allows you to search jobs by description, where they’re located… that will definitely be one of the places I look when it gets a little closer to graduation time.
- My mentor in D.C. also had mentioned that she intitially came to D.C. through a fellowship program, which got me looking into those as well. Atlanic Media just launched the Atlantic Media Fellowship Program this year, and they take between five and ten current students or recent graduates for a nine-month program during which they help “launch, research, write and edit new websites.” With my interest in online publications, this would be an AMAZING opportunity, so it’s definitely something I’m looking into.
- One other option that I’ve kind of toyed around with for a while is applying for the Newsweek summer internship program. Richard M. Smith is Newsweek’s chairman (and he was the editor-in-chief until December 2007) as well as an Albion alumnus, and although it’s unlikely that would give me any kind of an edge, I can dream right? The internship is in NYC, not D.C., but I won’t hold that against it.
So I guess I kind of have a plan now. Or at least several options for feasible plans. OH! And I created a LinkedIn profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/hollysetter– feel free to check it out, or add me as a contact or whatever. 