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As a recent journalism graduate, I can’t help but wonder, what’s next for me and my classmates?
Let’s be clear on one thing: We never really expected to graduate with jobs in the first place.
In journalism, and especially on the print side, my friends and classmates in the University of Missouri’s class of 2020 understood that graduating with a job would be wonderful, but unlikely. We expected, however, that we would all get jobs shortly after graduation, perhaps within a month of commencement. At the very least, by the time the summer was over, we would know what we would be doing come September.
But that expectation is looking grim. Newsrooms are facing layoffs, furloughs and closures at a pace unmatched in American journalism history. Like many other new journalists, I celebrated commencement virtually, watching my name scroll by on a video posted to Facebook, signaling my graduation from the place that was my home for the last four years.
I’m more fortunate than most students graduating during a pandemic. In late February, I was offered an internship at the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact. At the time, I was in New York City with MU’s Magazine Club — four days before the first confirmed COVID-19 case in the city.
When I applied to PolitiFact, I was also in the middle of applying to graduate school. Although I never expected to have a job before graduating, I was afraid of leaving MU without a summer internship and without getting
Read more here: https://www.poynter.org/educators-students/2020/what-its-like-to-graduate-from-journalism-school-during-a-pandemic/