Q. I've earned my living teaching college students to write papers, teaching researchers to write National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants and doing some media relations work for a clinic. Mostly I do writing workshops at NIH and coach researchers at a variety of medical centers how to write papers and grants. This work has increased my ability to "write science" and to write about science for a general audience. It has also given me a sense of hot topics and refined my ability to spot a good story.
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But I can't get a job!
I'd like to get a full-time journalism job, preferably at a university medical center news service. How do I proceed? I've never worked for a daily, except as a media relations person. I never went through J School "boot camp." I'd like to learn Web writing and photography, but what can I do to get my foot in the door?
Journalism jobs at local university and medical news services have come up, and I was interviewed at Duke, but the University of North Carolina sent me a rejection letter saying they found someone who has done the same media relations job elsewhere.
CarolA. The day before you wrote this, I was having a back-fence conversation with my neighbor the nurse. We talked about our jobs and, despite the ups and many downs, we agreed that the health-care field will be around for a while. Hey, if journalism doesn't work out for me ... you get the picture.
Your competition for a media-relations job could be other experienced professionals -- and some transplanted journalists who know the media from the inside.
I think you will have a tough time cracking this market. But while you don't know the inside of the media very well, you seem to be more conversant than most in grant writing and academia. Play to your strengths. You might be a stronger candidate for internal communications than for a medical center news service or media relations. Web writing, photography and some design as well could help you along in that direction.
You don't have to get a degree in these subject areas. You can learn a lot in months, as opposed to years, if you look for courses in your area.
Just don't go for the jobs that journalists might be looking at as second careers if it seems they have markedly greater qualifications than you.
Coming Thursday: This junior is devastated. Her summer internship evaporated when the paper dissolved just as summer is about to begin. She wonders whether she should just go to school and how much this will hurt future jobs.
