By
Katie Clark
Arizona Summer Wildcat
It's about 9:15 p.m. on Tuesday night and I have been sitting in the Wildcat newsroom, off and on, for about 10 hours today reading stories for this issue, one of our biggest issues of the year written and edited by one of the smallest staffs of the year. I'm working on finding errors, telling my reporters to go out and get more comments and to get better quotes for this paper.
My eyes are blurry and red from staring at a computer screen all day. I am hearing the expletives of my surrounding co-workers who feel the exact same way I do: tired, underpaid, hungry, buzzed from coffee and overall just ready to get home to crawl into bed and crash.
Some of us are making up songs to the tune of various Dave Matthews Band melodies, most of which are too inappropriate to quote. Some of us can't even manage to form sentences correctly, which provides a little bit of humor as we try to escape the reality that our deadline has long since passed but yet we are still here, impatiently typing away on our keyboards as if with each key we press it gets us closer to the cars in our parking lots and, eventually, to our nice warm beds.
And you know what? I love it.
I love the satisfaction of seeing that I have made something when I go to the newsstand the next day and see my name inside of the paper. And frankly, I love knowing that I love my job.
My father has worked for the same company for almost 40 years, and is just now thinking he might want to retire. As a teenager with several odd part-time jobs, I used to think he was crazy for wanting to deal with the monotony of working for the same company with the same people every day. Until I asked him one day why he did it. He looked at me and told me he loves going to work everyday and that makes it easy for him to do what he does.
No doubt there will be several people other than your parents who will tell you to "find your passion." And for some of you, the light bulb might not go off for a while. I started out as an anthropology major because I had a fascination with Egyptian archeology. But it took writing several journal articles to realize where my passion really was: writing, something I was afraid to do because I feared absolute destitution as I tried to make a living.
Figure out what you love to do. The university has a major for almost any field of interest. Try entomology, for instance, where you can take your childhood fascination with the bugs in your backyard and turn it into what could be a lucrative career (or at least a career where you get to play with bugs all day).
And while you will most likely dismiss my advice along with the advice of your parents and numerous administrators, make sure you don't dismiss possibly the best advice of all: your own. Remember the things you love and explore what you might be able to do with them.
I wrote my first "book" when I was 7 years old and dismissed it as a hobby. Now I sit here even more blurry-eyed then before, hoping with the last few words I can leave you all with some sort of insight that may or may not be tossed out with the other unwelcome insights of my predecessors. Whatever you decide, just remember this - nothing beats making money, however big or small the amount, through doing something you love.
