For many students, the looming transition from college to real world is daunting: the need to support oneself, establish a career, pay back student loans and simply stay afloat without the raft that is college frightens. Upon receiving a degree, the excuse of being in college will no longer validate excessive and random drinking, sleeping, eating, or movie-watching.
Despite its horrifying nature, the transition is universal. The following six recent USM alumni serve as examples that you can graduate; and survive.
Joey Turcotte graduated in 2007 with a Media Studies degree and concentration in production and writing.
“I decided I should probably try and get a job before spending another couple semesters on USM’s split campus,” he said, only a few credits shy of a third concentration.
So, he worked a summer job, one he had worked in years past. He pulled sixty-hour weeks and saved money to pay back his student loans. Six months after graduation, the payment begins. That fall, he quit and devoted all of his time to applying for media related jobs.
“I spent several hours-probably close to 50 or 60-perfecting my DVD portfolio, cover letters and resume,” Joey said.
He spent $250 making and shipping his portfolio to fifteen employers. Even after following up with each one, he heard nothing. Eventually, his money began to dwindle. He started working odd jobs, including some sparse freelance video editing and filming. That winter, the company AV Advantage interviewed and hired him as a videographer, editor and technician.
“The months and months I spent looking for a job really show you how competitive this field of work is,” he said.
Joey said his USM education was useful and necessary, but that the skills developed in the real world setting were most important.
“This degree is meaningless if you don’t continue to progress,” he said.
His brother, Steve Turcotte, graduated in 2008 with a Media Studies degree. He is still seeking long-term employment, but has had some freelance success since graduating.
Steve was hired by local filmmaker Betsy Carson to edit her cooking show, “Delicious TV.” He interned with her the previous semester and was hired freelance to edit the fourth season of the show. His job was to capture data from the cameras’ HD memory cards to a computer and quickly return them to the crew so they could continue shooting. He then organized the clips, chose segments which would be used and created a layout of each episode in the timeline.
The work flow was very efficient and organized,” he said. “So much that by the end of the six day shoot, all of the episodes were in the timeline and nearly half were already cut to broadcast length.”
That work lasted a month. A few months later, the first 3 seasons of “Delicious TV” were picked up by a Romanian broadcasting company. Carson hired Steve to edit the sound for the entire third season. This time, his job was to mute all English dialogue while keeping the ambient kitchen sounds and cooking audio intact.
“As we progressed, we began to develop quite a large sound library of various actions: quick knife slices, setting down a small glass bowl, stirring a pasty mixture with a wooden spoon,” Steve said.
Heidi McDonald graduated in 2006 with a degree in Social and Behavioral Sciences. Today, she is employed by the University of Maine system as an Administrative Assistant II while working toward a master’s degree from USM.
“The immediate threat of not having a paycheck became relevant, and I ended up taking the first job I was offered,” she said.
On a day-to-day basis, Heidi answers an endless stream of telephone calls, registers students for classes, schedules system-wide distance education courses for upcoming semesters and fulfills a host of other administrative duties.
“I’m not directly using my B.A. at this point,” she said. “However, my education has allowed me to understand the concepts and objectives in my field-higher education- much more clearly.”
Kate McRae graduated from the USM School of Music in 2008 and moved to Burlington, Vermont. She teaches K-8 music in nearby Westford. Aside from her day job, Kate teaches piano lessons and performs live with the group Bella Voice.
“I am doing a conducting internship with Dr. Dawn Willis, as well as running choral and instrumental workshops at local high schools,” she said
She says that though she misses Portland, the move was a good one. She plans on applying to graduate school in the Chicago area next fall.
Emma Kafka graduated from USM with an Art degree in 2007. She worked locally for a few years, but eventually felt the need to get out of the “Portland rut,” as she calls it. She moved to Brooklyn and is looking for work in New York, not necessarily something related to her major, but something that will allow her to be flexible-a job she “doesn’t dread, with great coworkers.”
“I’m really looking forward to creating a community here and making the kinds of friends I had in Portland,” she said.
Chell Stephen, originally from Toronto, graduated in 2005 from the Media Studies program. She is working in New York for the video-on-demand music network Music Choice. Chell works as an independent music video director-the kind of job a media studies graduate would kill for. After USM, she obtained a master’s degree from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communication. Chell planned on moving to New York after graduation, with or without a job and place to live.
“Though I’d applied for what feels like a billion positions, I had essentially placed all of my eggs in one basket,” she said.
That basket was Music Choice. She met a Syracuse alumnus at one of the company’s industry seminars and decided it was the job she wanted. She aggressively kept in touch with him, sending homemade thank you cards, emails and showing in person up to share a music video she had finished.
The night before graduation in April, she received a call from the company saying she was hired as a Production Assistant. She was promoted to Junior Producer a year later and now works on a weekly new releases program and produces a rock show.
“My job consists of researching, interviewing bands, shooting in the field and in studio, field producing and editing,” she said. “Seeing the show from start to finish.”
Chell speaks fondly of her USM experience, specifically of the Media Studies department.
“I loved the coursework of the program and found that like most things, you can get out of it exactly what you are willing to put in,” she said.
She says that undergraduate studies are where you learn the little things: “How to be a fully functioning human, what you want to spend your time doing, and how to make the most of what’s laid out in front of you.”
“Kate Kaminski and Nat Ives are two instructors whose dedication, combined with unbelievable knowledge and experience, make the Media Studies program so strong,” she said.
Chell keeps a blog, www.brownbookelastic.com, where she writes about her work directing videos and shooting live music.
As difficult and time-consuming as college can be, the real work seems to come after graduation: applying for jobs, racing to interviews, consolidating debt. These people are living proof that hard work does pay; and that immediate post-graduate experience is as much of a stepping stone as college itself; and, of course, the possibility that amid the cogs of upward mobility, USM will be remembered as a block of time, a hazy part of life where you just may have had it easy.