I've known that I wanted to be a writer since I was little. I would write dozens of "stories" and make everyone I knew who could read look at them. I imagined my life as an adult would be me sitting in a mansion somewhere making stuff up for a living and magically receiving millions of dollars as people everywhere ravenously consumed my glorious fiction. However, once I started applying to colleges, panic set in and I decided I was going to be a journalist. I became drawn to the idea of helping to shape public opinion. It's not the most lucrative or stable career by a long shot, but less scary to me than fiction writing (kudos to those who were brave enough to choose it, you're probably having fun.) When I got to college, I was amazed to be surrounded by like-minded people in my classes with similar goals and inspirations. Every specific major tends to earn itself a different reputation, and in college, you are no longer just classified by being "you." Your course of study also gives you a certain set of character traits that you didn't even know you had! This must be what everyone means when they say you learn a lot about yourself in college. While there are probably about fifty different things associated with being a communications major, I'd like to address the main two.

As a communications major, I was shocked to learn that people actually go to school in order to be better prepared to enter the workforce. Somewhere along the line, it became perfectly polite to tell someone in higher education point blank that they'll never find a job once they graduate. And in case you were wondering, we really appreciate it. People expect jobs from this? No, thanks. It turns out that even though I didn't go to school for fiction writing, everyone still thinks that everything I write is flung haphazardly into the abyss. This is not a "myth debunked." There actually are careers in the media industry, but they are pretty tricky to find. If you look more closely at every single program on television that you're watching or any news/entertainment/anything piece of writing that you're reading, you'll find that they're actually created by people and don't just magically appear. That's us. If you think it's frivolous, you might be right. It's not exactly open-heart surgery. However, in a digital world, it's important to have legitimate coverage and analysis of current events.

Besides the fact that it's assumed normal to tell students in college that they'll immediately fail at their career goals, it's also totally cool to discredit any work they've done at school and also to assume they don't do any work at all. Now hear me out - not all majors are created equal or provide all students with equal levels of difficulty. That's why I'm not gonna make as much money as the kid ripping his hair out studying for a bio exam. However, my homework is not "watching a movie." There's a great deal of theory that goes into analyzing and creating media content, even if it doesn't seem like it. It's also not my job to constantly prove the legitimacy of my chosen course of study by listing 99 reasons why my homework is "real" work. If you want to completely dismiss me as a professional because you deem your own field more important, be my guest. You write me off as unimportant, I'll write you off as self-important.

While there are a million other things I'm tired of hearing as a journalism student, I feel that these two reasons contain enough shade-throwing to encompass everything else that pisses us off. When it comes down to it, we're just trying to do what we love. We're fully aware this isn't going to get us the most money as professionals, and we're fully aware that other students have more stressful workloads. We're also capable of seeing that both of those things are directly correlated. Trust me, if we felt we could all be doctors or lawyers for the rest of our lives in order to make more money, we'd be there instead. To the students or professionals who aren't as lucky to be able to do what they want for a living and still work hard to make ends meet, I'm truly inspired. I'm fortunate enough to be able to pursue this career, so I'm going for it. Quite frankly, it's none of anyone's business but mine.