“The best career advice to give the youg is, ‘Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.'”
— Katharine Whiteborn

Or as I have said before, “I don’t get paid enough to hate my job.” I wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t what I truly felt I should be and honestly want to do with my life.

A bonus quote on the same topic:

“Our world is incomplete until each of us discovers what moves us — our passion. No other person can hear our calling. We must listen and act on it for ourselves.”
— Richard J. Leider

Sorry for the lack of updates. The last few weeks, especially last week for some reason, have been pretty hectic and draining on me. I think it might be my attempts to squeeze way too much into too little time. Perhaps that is why it seems time has sped up rather than slowed down as I get more into my job. On the bright side, I had my 90-day review and it went well. Looks like I don’t suck too bad; they’re keeping me around. ;)

A few quick updates, just to catch everyone, including myself, up to speed.

I went home this weekend. Home, home, to Akron, Ohio. It was my mother’s birthday, and I surprised her with an unannounced visit (that took a lot of maneuverability on my part and included working Easter).

The highlights of the weekend included surprising my mom at dinner with flowers (that should have been delivered to her office but the company lost my order!); catching up with my sisters, mom and dad; seeing the Monet in Normandy exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art; hearing a ridiculously funny comic at a comedy club; not dying in perhaps the most narrowly avoided high-speed, late-night highway covered in snow accident of all time; spending time with my dog; hanging out with all my Stater friends; finding out the Stater/KSU student media did awesome in the SPJ regional competition; catching up with all the JMC professors; finally seeing my diploma — four months after graduation.

This morning/afternoon I made the rounds in Taylor Hall talking to all the professors. I swear I was asked at least half a dozen of the same questions related to the Gannett “information center” and how it applies at my paper. Who posts to the Web? Does it go through an editor? What do you post? When? Do you write the same or different for online/print? Who writes the headlines? Are you doing video/shooting stills/doing Podcasts/blogs/etc.? Why/why not? Are other people/citizens doing those things? Who edits them? Do you have all those different “desks”? How does that work? Is it really 24 hours? and so forth.

Then there were the questions more pertinent to me/my daily job: Do you like it? The city? The paper? Your roommates? How about your co-workers — mostly older or younger? how many reporters? who’s your editor? do you like them? What all are you responsible for covering? Is it mostly assigned or school board meetings or do you do more enterprise and issues? What’s a typical day for you? How many hours do you work each week? How many stories do you write? What’s your favorite that you’ve done so far? How long do you think you’ll stay? Where do you think you’ll look next? (The last two questions, just in case my editors happen to read this, which I don’t think they do but you never know, are very premature. I’m about to sign a 12-month lease. This means I intend to stay for at least another year. So relax. I’m not jumping ship.)

I felt like I should have prepared a handout with frequently asked questions. (The last time I felt like that, incidentally, was when I was going through my round of job interviews and I felt as if I was being asked the same half dozen questions or variations on them from every single person.) It was funny because they all asked almost identical questions at first. They all seemed really eager to see how I was faring in the real world. I’ve said before that I think I’m their guinea pig in terms of “how does a KSU graduate with the talents and skills employers say they’re looking for fare when she leaves the confines of college and starts working for a newspaper company?” Sometimes it makes me afraid to answer because I think they might take it at face value and alter their curriculum or something crazy based on my personal experience. At the least, I know from my own classes and hearing about other grads, my job will become an anecdote for their future students.

But I guess, as Jan put it when we met for coffee, they are all journalists — former reporters and editors. Asking questions is what they do best. But seriously, I felt like we were playing 20 Questions about your new job. Still, it was nice to catch up with everyone and hear about the Franklin Hall excitement/confusion/concerns.

It’s also very surreal to be back in the Stater newsroom, a place where I spent the majority of my collegiate career, and not be a part of the paper. When they were all upset about some headline on the Forum page, it was nice to be able to sit there and say, “Ha. Not my problem.” Probably not nice to them. But it was a nice feeling for me not to be responsible for everyone else’s mistakes. I will say having been editor, managing editor and campus editor in college makes me much more appreciative of the work my editors do every day. And I’ve told my editor on a few occasions that I don’t think I’d ever want his job. His response was, “Get one crappy assignment too many, and you’ll change your mind.” We’ll see about that. In the meantime, as much as I loved being editor and being able to execute my vision for the paper/Web site, I really appreciate that my job now has me answering for me not 100+ other kids who may or may not care as much as I do.

OK. Bed time. I’m heading in early Tuesday to catch up on e-mail and messages from Friday through today before my day really picks up. I promise to try and do a better job updating this week.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the roads which lie ahead, and those over which we have traveled, and if the future road looms omnious or unpromising, and the roads back uninviting, then we need to gather our resolve and, carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road in another direction.”
— Maya Angelou

My God, get over yourself.

University officials say organizing an inauguration is so time-consuming that it can’t be coordinated with a president’s actual arrival on campus.

“It’s a mammoth job,” said Kathy Stafford, KSU vice president of university relations and development. “It would have been really, really difficult to get something organized for the fall.”

(But they can search, screen and choose candidates entirely in private and organize a mass press conference during exam week when no students are around or are too busy studying to be bothered learning who will lead their university into the foreseeable future, all before summer officially landed in Kent. ??)

While the M.A.C. Center can accommodate 6,000 people, the university will adjust the seating for a more intimate setting of 1,500, with about 1,200 faculty, students, government officials, alumni and the like expected to attend the free ceremony at 2:30 p.m.

In his speech, Lefton will lay out his vision for Kent State. So far, he has said he wants to elevate Kent State in the all-important national rankings, shape the university into a national leader and become more selective in what it offers.

I want to know how many students they’re actually expecting to show up. Realistically, they’re probably adjusting the seating because it would look pretty empty with an extra 4,800 empty seats. I’m just sayin’.

All this is modest when compared to that of many other colleges and universities. Some take the inauguration of a new president as a reason to roll out an entire week or month in balls, guest speakers, symposiums, concerts and the like.

“We think it’s an important celebration that the university needs to have to launch the new leadership, but considering how tight money is these days, we don’t want to make a bigger deal out of it than it is,” Stafford said.

“We’re trying to keep this much lower key” than the university did with its last president, Cartwright, in 1991, she said.

I’m betting most universities don’t wait a year to roll it all out, therefore diminishing the interest in the “new” guy. And even if they do, they’re just being silly, too. And I don’t care what Cartwright’s inauguration was like. Was she entering at a time when tuition had pretty much doubled over the last four years? (Seriously, I paid almost twice as much for my last semester as I did for my first.) Was she entering when college tuition was at an all-time high, especially relative to the average family income? I don’t know the details of her appointment, or care. Honestly guys, I was in first grade. I was more concerned with finding out where spot was always running to than who was heading some university. I’d like to know how much all of this is going to cost, and more important, where that money is coming from. It seems an awful lot of preparation for a guy who likely won’t stick around to see the decade out. Again, I’m just sayin’.

Kent State is poised for great things, [Lefton] has said over and over: “We’re poised to bust through the plexiglass ceiling.”

Wow, how witty. The ceiling isn’t glass anymore, it’s plexiglass. Doesn’t that make it harder to break?

I also love (read: am confused as to why) that they don’t have story comments on the story. Because I would have liked to see what other community members were thinking.

Some random thoughts before I get off for the night:

• Working Sunday really isn’t that bad, even the 8 a.m. shift when you’re alone in the office babysitting the scanner and updating the site. The drawback is there is pretty much nothing going on that isn’t somehow church-related. I’m not sure how my editor took it when my reaction was, “You want me to… cover a church service?” But luckily, we were able to come up with a pretty sweet angle. I’ll probably post that story in the clips tomorrow when it runs (not because it’s amazing or “clip-worthy” but because I liked it). Add to the mix that it was a holiday and Sunday, and today was the slowest news day of my working life.
• I also work Christmas this year. Both of these holidays I inadvertedly talked myself into working. I should keep my mouth shut.
• I have been wasting too much time on Twitter already. It’s cutting into my Facebook time. ;)
• Speaking of Facebook, I have a question and want to hear some opinions. One of my co-workers, about my age and also a member of Facebook, today told me I was “brave for listing your political leanings” on Facebook. While I’m not a hardcore anything, and I do understand how having my political leanings known could be perceived as a conflict of interest, I’m wondering if it actually matters? I’m not out there crusading for any causes or signing and circulating any petitions. I know it really depends on the organization’s policy, and I would have to ask my editors if it was a definite don’t. But I wanted to hear some thoughts. I’ve discussed this blog with the powers that be at my paper, and we kind of came up with some ground rules. One of them being I can’t go off on political rants. (I wouldn’t anyway. I don’t know enough or care enough about politics to get into it. Most of it’s just semantics anyway.) But I don’t see how admitting I lean liberal is a horrible thing? It’s a bias I know exists and because of that, when dealing with issues where it comes into play, I almost overcompensate for it. I do not cover government where political parties really play any role, and I don’t really ever want to do such reporting. Though, the same person also raised the point that being registered as a member of one party or another falls in the same category. I definitely disagree with that. If I want to vote in a primary election, I have to pick one party or another. Should my job dictate that it is not OK for me to vote in a primary election, which is part of my constitutional rights? (Granted, either way it doesn’t matter this year — we have no contested seats in primaries in the county.) My argument was my Facebook also indicates I am “Christian.” Should that bar me from covering anything that has to do with religion because I have stated publicly what camp I stand in? I don’t know. But thought it was an interesting topic to bring up.
• I have pretty much finished reading Somebody Told Me and can already tell that I am a stronger writer because of it. I think I am more aware of the nuances of word choice and descriptive details after noticing how effortlessly he weaved them in and impressed me. Seriously, at several points I was jealous of his talent at finding the perfect words and phrases to describe people, places, actions or even ideas. They say reading makes you a better writer. Anyone wanting to write, I recommend reading the articles in that book.
• Currently, I’m reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. I really like it so far. I read one of the quotes on the book that said it was like the Sound and the Fury meets the Catcher in the Rye. I agree, and think it’s equally as good as both of those classics.
• All of this reading is part of my effort to get through the mountain of books I have purchased but not had time to read. It is actually getting ridiculous in that I am out of room on my shelves for anymore unread books. And I really miss visiting Borders. So I need to clear this queue quickly. I also really want to sign up for the local libraries, but I can’t because I feel guilty looking at the stacks of unread books for which I’ve actually paid.
• At the end of this week is my 90-day mark at my job. This means I’ll be eligible for health insurance and all that fun stuff. That is, as long as they don’t think I suck too bad and decide, eh, it’s not working out. (The first 90 days are “probationary.”) I looked over my review checklist already, and it looks like I’ll be sticking around. So yay for not being horrible at journalism and not failing at my first job. I know it’s silly, but I have a tendency to worry about these things.
• Also, I can’t believe I’ve only been here three months. It seems like I’ve been here for only a few weeks and also like I’ve been doing this for years. It’s hard to describe. There is still so much unconquered territory, even just on my own beat. (In my defense, I’m responsible for something like two dozen school corporations spread out across 10 counties, each with several schools.) But I’m also taking on more responsibilities here and starting some new projects. It’s also a reminder that I’ve been gone nearly a semester from the Stater, and yet that world still turns without me. God, so much to learn!

That’s all I’ve got. What, like that isn’t enough?

“Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.”
— Christopher Morley