Every Bit of Ink

Passion trumps experience, student learns

Cassandra Jowett
Published in The Ryersonian on October 1, 2008

When the air gets cooler and the leaves start to change colour, you know what time of year it is. It’s internship application time, of course.

This time last year I started the months-long process of applying for any paid journalism internships I could find. Come spring, I still didn’t have an opportunity nailed down. Nobody wanted to hire me.

By mid-April, I was desperate. I knew I had a lot of great skills and even more potential. The thought of wasting yet another summer folding clothes made me feel sick.

As I prepared for my last exam one morning, I watched a young woman talk about her new company on Breakfast Television.

Lauren Friese had recently launched TalentEgg.ca, a career site just for university students and recent graduates who are looking for career opportunities ranging from internships to entry-level roles after graduation.

What a great idea, I thought. I signed up on the website right away hoping to find my dream internship for the summer. Unfortunately, since they were such a new company, there weren’t any journalism opportunities.

But a few weeks later I received an e-mail from Friese. They were looking to hire a student for the summer to do a bit of everything: sales, marketing, public relations, account management, website maintenance. With no other prospects in sight, I sent Friese an e-mail right away.

Within a week we met at a coffee shop for an interview. I dressed up and brought my resume and portfolio. Friese wore jeans and didn’t want to see my qualifications.

She asked me to relate the skills I developed while attending school, volunteering and working with the work I would be doing as the company’s summer intern. On the spot I had to recognize my own potential out loud.

I told Friese that calling employers to get them interested in the company was sort of like cold-calling sources for news stories.

Account management would be a breeze because I’d been managing information, interview notes and source lists for three years at Ryerson.

I knew how to read and write basic web programming languages because I had built and maintained websites for years.

As a journalism student, I was professionally trained to write and edit copy, so posting information on the website and communicating with employers would be my specialty.

It wasn’t like any other job interview I had ever done. They weren’t like any company I had ever worked for, either.

I received a two-month crash course in what goes on behind the scenes of a small, new online business and contributed my own ideas and hard work to an up-and-coming, quickly growing company.

I also came to the realization that my potential and passion for a job is at least equal to, if not more valuable than, the sum of my relevant work experience, especially in a short-term or entry level position.

And after spending the summer speaking to big and small employers from across the country in almost every industry, many of whom are now searching for students and new grads on the website, I can be confident that’s what they’re looking for in the students and new grads they hire too.

They want candidates who are confident in the skills they already have, able to apply those skills to new and challenging tasks, and passionate about the possibility of doing so.

For me and other university students, that means our future job hunts won’t be so grim, and hopefully our potential career paths aren’t limited to the one printed on our degrees when we graduate.