A School Shooter
A fictional short-short story
After finishing my B.A., wondering what to do, I got excited when I saw an ad for Midwestern State University’s master’s in journalism: It had photos of graduates proud of their good journalism jobs, one holding a Pulitzer.
I was excited to have been admitted. And I remember the excitement in Professor Green’s Journalism as Activism course. He taught us, for example, about how to investigate Trump or agitate for gun control, while masking our bias. For example, we might interview one person on the opposite side and give him one sentence in the penultimate paragraph.
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Notwithstanding the six-figure student debt I’d have to start paying, when I graduated, I remained excited at the thought of an investigative journalism career. So I sent samples of mock investigative articles that I had written in my classes to 23 publications— I counted — yes, some reaches like the New York Times — but like when I applied to college, a couple of safeties. I got a total of one response — a form-letter rejection. The rest ghosted me. Of course, that reduced my excitement but I wasn’t ready to give up on a journalism career. So I sent my samples to 11 less august media outlets. I got a few nice rejections but the only job offer was to write obits and ads for the Peoria Pennysaver. I figured you gotta start somewhere.
But it’s been a year and I’m still there, although I do get to write about high school sports, school board meetings, and the police blotter. My resentment of Midwest State’s journalism program grew, and I wanted to do something about it. So I got the list of recent graduates — I got 87 names and was able to contact 59, not bad.
One is a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times and she got to do a piece on Mayor Johnson, but most of the others could hardly feel good about having spent all that time and money on a journalism master’s. Their jobs include Lyft driver, barista, rent-a-car clerk, assembly line worker in his father’s factory, warehouseman — and he was worried about losing his job to a robot. One felt lucky to get a secure job working at the DMV, having risen from taking license photos to handling appeals of license suspensions.
My sadness festered into anger, and I decided to tabulate the results, get an Uzi, and march into Professor Green’s office, who is now the department chair. I pointed the Uzi at him and said, “Your courses preach ethics. Well, you guys are unethical — false advertising, leading us naive young people to think we’d have a realistic chance at a sustainable-paying journalism career. We spent two of our life’s best years and a fortune, and most of us are doing shit jobs and can’t even begin to pay off our student loans. I pulled the trigger and sprayed his face with water.
I read this aloud on YouTube.
Marty Nemko is a career and personal coach and author of 35 books including A Dose of Reality, Work Stories, and Affirmative Actions. You can reach him at mnemko@gmail.com
