College essay: Professional

In the summer of 2002, I went into my office, turned off the lights, locked the door, sat in the dark and thought long and hard about when I had been happiest.

It wasn’t that I was in a bad place, career-wise; far from it. I was working as a public relations coordinator for arguably the most successful American videogame development house, making a good living, had my own private office and we had just announced World of Warcraft, which would go on to become one of the most successful computer games in history.

But I wasn’t happy.

In 1998, I had moved to California to be with the woman I would later marry, but had moved into a difficult media market without a job prospect and had ended up working for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, repackaging other people’s work for clients’ Web sites. When the Chicago Tribune bought out the paper and closed down my division, I ended up doing PR for Blizzard Entertainment.

I kept my hand in with journalism, reporting for the most popular comic book Web site, but it wasn’t the same. I missed the adrenaline rush of chasing a big story, wanting to be accurate, be thorough, be complete and even be first. And after 9/11, I missed feeling like, on a good day, I had made the world at least a slightly better place at the end of the day.

So, in the summer of 2002, with the blessing and encouragement of my wife, I again plunged into the job market without prospects but with a goal. I ended up working at a weekly newspaper in her hometown, reentering the industry where I had come in, in community journalism, covering local politics, business and features.

I hadn’t intended to become a journalist when I first went to Virginia Tech. I had planned on becoming a disc jockey, a dream that died when I discovered I didn’t enjoy spending hours by myself in a small room that smelled of stale coffee, body odor and, in those days, cigarettes.

While I tried to figure out what to change my major to, my advisor suggested I try out the school’s new Electronic News Gathering class. It was a revelation: With a camera on my shoulder and microphone in my hand, there was seemingly no place that I couldn’t go and no one I couldn’t meet. Virginia Tech’s ENG class was hands-on, and each week we assembled a 30-minute news broadcast that went out on the campus cable system.

Unfortunately, after I’d taken a year of the class, I found the more theoretical broadcasting and communications classes couldn’t keep my attention the same way, and I devoted more time to the campus newspapers and television station than I did my studies. I received a solid hands-on education but don’t generally have the grades to show for it.

After college, I dutifully sent my resume tape out to small market stations around the region, but needed to get a job sooner rather than later, as my parents were moving overseas for my father’s work. At the suggestion of my girlfriend, with a whole one major newspaper story under my belt, I applied for a reporting job at the local daily, the 1,300 circulation News Messenger in Christiansburg, Virginia. To my surprise, I landed the position and went through a heady period where every week, I could see and feel my skills improving on the job.

Almost 16 years and four newspapers later, it’s clear to me that this is what I want to do. I don’t want to be an editor, I don’t want to be a publisher, I want to be a reporter. I want to be the person the readers can rely on to be at the events they can’t attend, to give them analysis they can trust and to be the watchdog they can put their faith in.

If I could go back to the fall of 1987, when I arrived on the Virginia Tech campus as a freshman, I would study journalism from the start and write for the Collegiate Times. Instead, I find myself armed with skills that I’ve learned on the job, and probably my share of bad habits as well.

If this is to be my life’s work, I want to start the third act better prepared, with a solid journalism education, top drawer training and my bad habits shattered.

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