Catch a falling star this year

Updated on: Monday, June 15, 2009

While many of her friends are getting their diplomas and moving into the ‘real’ world this spring, Ankita Rao, a student of journalism from Columbia University has applied to a magazine in India and guess what? She’s been accepted as an apprentice. While others are cribbing about the shrinking pipeline of jobs for fresh graduates this year, there are those like Rao, who are googling for offbeat opportunities in far-flung places like Costa Rica, India, or Singapore to take up odd jobs while freelancing or looking for an unpaid photo/print stint at home. A few others are sticking to small-town weeklies or magazines until things begin to look up.

“I didn’t want an enrolment in a law school or MCAT classes that wouldn’t have landed me on the path that I wished to take. There were those who warned me that print journalism was dying in America, but I did some research of my own and landed this paid internship in India,” says Rao.

Agrees Rupali Arora, a young graduate from Delhi University, “The fact is that the print media is dying only in the first world. The rest of the world still depends on age-old printing presses and can offer fantastic jobs to those with the right aptitude for the off-beat.” Arora herself is interning with a newspaper in the capital.

To make things easy for their students, professors in journalism schools across the US, according to media reports, have begun to arm their students with “backpack journalism” skills such as video editing, RSS-savvy writing and web design, as well as PR and advertising. “This is not the time to be picky,” says Mukta Chowdhary another journalism student at Columbia University.

Rao feels that it’s also a good idea to showcase your talent through social media forums like Facebook, You Tube, or My Space. With jobs of one’s choice being hard to find, you could explore options of your own, she feels. A case in point is an e-mail to Rao from friend Chikodi Chima who has launched her own web site and will be exploring entrepreneurship opportunities around the developing world. “I created a journalistic project called TechTrotter (techtrotter. org) and it will take me travelling for two months to Brazil, Ukraine, Nigeria, South Africa, India and to the Philippines!” Chima writes to Rao.

“The best advice I’ve got so far comes from a neighbour, Uttam Reddy, who said that every chaotic situation (read: our economy) is an opportunity for something fresh and better,” wrote Kavya in a essay that appeared in the web edition of a newsletter published by the South Asian Journalism Association (SAJA), recently. All going to show that while the world waits for the meltdown to correct itself, the student fraternity can afford to take time off to do their own thing before joining regular jobs of their choice.

Deccanchronicle

Catch a falling star this year

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