(The Beacon)
By Pete Lesage, Guest Commentary
A long time ago, during what's now called the Neolithic Period (that's the 1970s, if you haven't taken anthropology), I had a University of Portland classmate who majored in philosophy. We used to tell him there were no job openings for anyone who could spell Kierkegaard, let alone understand him. Maybe because even McDonald's wouldn't hire my friend, he always needed money. So one day he ignored my constant teasing and joined me on The Beacon staff, where eventually he rose to editor and became what we thought at the time was fabulously wealthy.
After graduating, he put his degree to the kind of use all good philosophy majors do: He went into the shipping business. He didn't become fabulously wealthy by our new standard, but he enjoyed more than two decades of accomplishment.
Surely classes in metaphysics were a big part of his success. But if you ask him, he'll tell you that working in student media was even bigger. What could he have possibly learned from The Beacon that he could never have learned from Carl Jung? How to meet deadlines. How to write reports that impressed his bosses. How to quickly deconstruct complicated documents into their most important elements. How to get publicity for his company. Oh, and how to get other people to do all those things.
Even if your most burning ambition is to get someone to read your blog, or to be as pithy and witty as your most popular Facebook friends – or to just not have to work at McDonald's while going to school – you should consider taking the same path he did (the philosophy degree part is up to you).
You don't have to plan a career in journalism. You never know when you might need the skills you learn in student media. Let's say the small business you're working for wants to promote you to a management position that requires you to put together an annual budget. Do you know how to read a budget, let alone write one? Can you find spending inefficiences or spot oversight weaknesses that could encourage embezzlement? Or maybe you're running a fund-raiser for your church or community. Can you set up an easily navigable website and write headines that optimize search-engine algorithms to draw a lot of traffic? Or maybe you just want to take photos of your friends and once, just once, not cut off the top of their heads.
So go ahead, sign up. There's nothing like the adrenaline rush of your first byline (or your hundredth, for that matter), seeing your name on top of an important news story everybody has to read. It may not be quite as thrilling as getting an "A" on a paper about Emmanuel Kant, but it's damn close.
