J4450: My Dream Job

I hope my professors don’t see this post.

I’ve had somewhat of a personality crisis the last several weeks. I’ve always been the kid who liked school. Since an early age, I committed myself to caring about homework. And, even though high school popularity depended on the indifference, or perceived indifference, of school work, I continued to care about it. For better or worse, I tended to define myself by this fact.

However, I don’t really look forward to sitting in lecture halls anymore. I don’t really look forward to reading academic papers anymore. And I don’t look forward to writing essays anymore.

I just want to read and write news.

Really! I’m kind of fed up with school work at this point. I don’t want to do it anymore — OK, I’m going to backtrack a bit: I still am going to sit in lecture halls, read academic papers and write essays. I’m just really only looking forward to being in the Missourian newsroom, interviewing people and writing stories.

This weekend, I signed up for a newsletter from Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer at The Atlantic, called The Best of Journalism. Superlatives aside, it’s pretty cool. Friedersdorf sends you six stories a week that he thinks are some of the best examples of journalism on the web.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Why can’t you find those on your own?” Well, he’s already found me two pieces I loved that I wouldn’t have found otherwise:

• Graeme Wood’s “Outrageous Freedom” at aeonmagazine.com, and
• Vanessa Veselka’s “The Truck Stop Killer” at gq.com.

I think that would be an awesome job: writing for one media outlet and reading the content of others.