I Am Graduating Still

 

It’s the season of Dads and grads. My phone has blown up recently with pictures of young people in caps and gowns, sent by their proud parents. On a rainy weekday early this month I found myself in an auditorium watching a member of our family receive her hood for a PhD she’d been working on since the pandemic.

It had been a long time since I’d attended such a ceremony, so I was surprised to find myself become emotional. That’s something you’d expect to do at weddings and funerals. I forgot that education—the yearning to strive, learn, get better—is a powerful trigger for me.

In this case, I was struck with a memory from my past.

Freshman year of journalism school. I’m sitting in the seminar portion of my larger COM107 class—the first course every journalism student takes—when the professor makes a bold statement.

He says that journalism as we know it, as we’ve practiced it since the turn of the century, is on the ropes. Thought leaders now say that a person who enters the profession can expect to make seven significant career pivots in their lifetime.

We were kids. We knew nothing. His statement went right over our heads.

Then he broke it down.

I am not saying that you will have seven jobs in your lifetime. Doing the same thing seven times in a row. No.

Oh—I thought. That’s exactly what my baby brain thought you meant.

In the course of your lifetime, he went on, you will shift to radically different careers. Maybe you start out as a reporter for a newspaper, but eventually you will write press releases for an electric company, you will run marketing for a huge bookstore chain like Barnes & Noble, you will start your own public relations firm, and by the time you retire you’ll be running the fundraising arm for your local theatre company. That’s what I mean.

This happened in a classroom in the early 1980s, which meant that even Prof. Babcock—who was then and remained for decades after, a towering figure in communications research—could not foresee the impact the Internet would have on journalism. Newspapers began their death spirals when Craigslist arrived in 1995. Suddenly people had a free or free-ish place to take their classified ads, which newspapers had monopolized and charged through the nose for since the dawn of print. The loss of that revenue, and the revenue from display ads, cost newspapers dearly.

Back in 2026, as I waited for the graduation ceremony to start, I ticked off the jobs I’d had. I’d gone to school for magazine journalism. I knew I couldn’t hack daily journalism. I was a features writer at heart. I would write for the glossies, thought I.

If you squint at my resume, you would see a career that probably defied Professor Babcock’s thesis.

I wrote for children’s magazines for my first two jobs, then I jumped to a dot-com (undreamt-of in Babcock’s philosophy), then went freelance and wrote for a string of magazines before segueing to books and ghostwriting. Aside from the blip represented by that website, my career did not at all conform to a seven-career shift.

At heart I am still a writer and editor.

Babcock’s prediction came true only in the new skills I was forced to master. By the time I had books to promote and clients to woo, the practice of typing up a resume and dropping it off at the neighborhood printer to be—ha!—expensively typeset and run off on fancy paper was laughable.

The early 2000s I had to learn how to design a website. By 2009, when my wife and I published a book on the signers of the Declaration of Independence, we were designing t-shirts. (One for every signer! Collect all 56! Geez, was that a crazy idea).

Social media meant learning how to shoot photos, add text to them, and send them out into the world, often with appended music.

You know—to do the job most publishers had stopped doing.

When publishers ran a quick 'n' dirty ebook sale of one of our titles, we dropped everything and designed a promo ad to distribute on social media, the way an advertising director might do.

We learned how to pitch our books to bookstores and non-stores, landing new accounts the way sales reps would.

We learned to approach radio stations and book reviewers, the way publicists would.

Today, if you look at the website of the school I attended, they announce with some puffery that they are preparing students for careers in digital journalism. They have stopped the charade that they are teaching for a one-track career. Graduates, they say, must be ready to tell stories across multiple platforms.

Every year, when I do our taxes, I am amazed by the sheer number of software programs our household subscribes to. And I’m sure you, my fellow 21st Century scribes, are in a somewhat similar situation. Some more than others, no doubt.

It is only when I step back and recall that I entered my freshman dorm toting an electric typewriter…

It is only when I recall that the journalism school taught us to set type by hand, just to give us a feel for the origins of that quaintly ancient technology…

It is only when I recall that the journalism school later ditched that very same type lab—sold off all those wooden trays of backwards lead letters to the art school across the street, retired the elderly pressman who ran the hand-cranked press…and filled the lab space with gleaming IBM personal computers in my senior year…

It is only then that I can appreciate the shift in time.

This came to me in a flash, all at the start of that graduate school ceremony, and I could not shake the grateful thought that I am graduating still.

A while back, I decided to build an online store for our books and stories. Many writers have done this, and it felt like a good, long-term goal. If nothing else, it would be a place to refer all those people who ask, “What’s the best place to buy your books?” (They say this as if they haven’t wandered into a bookstore in ages, which—sigh—they probably haven’t.)

It took me two years, but the store is finally live. It took that long because I needed to learn or relearn a lot of new skills. Guess what? (The Declaration Signer t-shirts are back!) Next up: I am teaching myself to record my short stories. I have bolted the microphone to the dining room table.

Why would anyone want to stop learning?

A person my wife interviewed for her first narrative nonfiction book arrived in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the 1940s to work as a lab chemist on the Manhattan Project. Few employees in the Secret City knew what they were working on, but Virginia, a trained scientist, surmised the truth. How could she not?

I miss Virginia. I enjoyed getting to know her during the writing of that book. She was kind enough to let us live at her home while Denise conducted her research so we didn’t have to keep shelling out for hotels.

By then Virginia was in her late eighties, walked with two canes, was partially blind, and wore two hearing aids. Each morning she headed to her office to wake her Mac. She had her screen zoomed to the highest setting so she could read the news in 120-point type. She prized her e-reader because the technology allowed her to do the same with books.

On one of those visits, she told us that she had enrolled in an exciting new class for the coming semester at the senior center. The instructor was a young physicist from the national lab.

“What’s the course?” we asked.

“The history of transuranic elements,” she replied.

God willing, I will be like her someday: Approaching my ninth decade and still learning. The only way to be, as far as I am concerned.

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See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com