This would be really funny if it weren’t also really true.
But at least I’m getting paid?
The magazine world capitaled in New York feels more than a few continents away as I sit in Israel. Science journalism has been difficult to explain to most of my friends, both of my parents, and pretty much everyone I’ve met here. Yet like every other obscure corner of the world, once you enter you realize how deep and competitive it goes. There’s science writing organizations to join, conferences to attend, master’s degrees to be had, and hundreds of people to follow on Twitter.
I’m beginning to make sense of it all. My first few months in Israel I felt radically disconnected from my life and aspirations back in America — traveling was so different it set a (good) shock to my system — but lately I’ve been living online and porting myself back into the journalism world. The journey away was necessary for me to know I really wanted it. As my time in Israel tipped into the second half, I had to make concrete plans about what to do when I returned.
Navigating through the low-wage, high-competition waters of magazine journalism is like navigating in shark-infested waters. Conditions aren’t ideal, but therein lies the frisson. Though yes, it is beyond frustrating that most magazines think interns should work full-time unpaid and that most internships require previous internship experience. None of this makes sense logically, so I feel as if I defied a few laws of physics to land where I am.
A question I routinely asked when contacting science writers for advice was whether to get a master’s in science journalism. Turns out this is a pretty useless question because the retrospective lens is also a deterministic one: most people will tell you to do exactly what they themselves did. (Side note: someone did make the point that, counter to the general trend in journalism, older journalists will advise against grad school because the science journalism programs didn’t really exist when they were breaking in. But the landscape has changed and having a degree is a nice shiny badge on your resume.) For various reasons mostly to do with money, I’ve decided against applying to these programs. (It’s even expensive to apply!) Practical considerations aside, I wondered if my attitude is of the same strain endemic to liberal arts schools and especially vigorous at Harvard – that job skills can be learned on the job. Harvard grants no journalism degrees but you can, if you so choose, live and breath the Crimson. This idea is even truer of banking and consulting jobs.
While I was sending out cover letters and resumes, a sociology paper on how banks, law firms, and consulting companies recruit young graduates landed like a dirty sock in my lap. The paper itself is great piece of research, but it affirmed all the worst things I knew to be true about recruiting. It is unfairly elitist when it comes to institutions: unless you went to a top school (and by top we mean top four), your resume goes unread into a black hole. It is unfairly elitist when it comes to individuals: they favor extracurriculars that take a long time to cultivate (aka your parents have been paying for your lessons since you were five) and sports popular with the white upper-middle class (squash, field hocky, crew). Working a job to support yourself through college, on the other hand, has no prestige. The system is obviously corrupt, but no more dysfunctional than unpaid internships, I have to admit. A part of me wondered why couldn’t I be interested in a field where my Harvard degree not only meant something but meant a lot, and why hadn’t I taken advantage of the food and drinks and swag of recruiting events when I was a student? Is this squandering a degree?
There were a few weeks when I caught the travel bug, and I wondered if I could ever afford to travel without regular income. Maybe this idea of a job as a just a job wasn’t so bad, so I should do something like biotech consulting and tend to my bank account. I stared at the Crimson Careers website for hours but the job descriptions just made me bleary eyed. Depending on where you fall on the spectrum of cynicism, one of my major faults or virtues is that it is impossible for me to fake enthusiasm. If I don’t want something, I can’t bring myself to do it.
In January, I’m moving to New York for a journalism internship.
