Thursday, July 25, 2013

Well, now what?

I graduated from MSU-Billings on May 4th of this year, with a BA in English and a pretty respectable GPA (3.85 for the semester and 3.49 cumulative - just shy of the 3.5 needed to graduate with honors).

So, what do I do now? I had a couple of leads for manuscript editing jobs, but they haven't panned out. I was going to apply to teach Freshman Comp. at the college, but I left it too late for this semester--looks like if I still want to do that, it'll have to be in the spring. And I applied for a job with the Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research, but was turned down. That was really a bummer because it sounded like the work would have been very similar to what I did for the Census a couple of years ago, plus it paid very well.

Tomorrow I'll go to one of the (semi) local newspaper offices, and apply as a copy editor, but that's only a couple of days a week (which, granted, is more than I work for NOISE & COLOR, a local magazine, but still not great). I really worry that I'm not going to find anything as an editor, and be stuck right back in retail, or worse, fast food. It makes me think that I shouldn't have bothered going back to school just to put myself into debt, that I just should have resigned myself to working jobs at just above minimum wage for the rest of my life.

But that kind of thinking *really* isn't going to get me anywhere. One thing I need to do is start learning everything I can about editing, and so I'm going on a hunt for writing and editing blogs. And as soon as I can, I'm going to start picking up every style guide I can get my hands on.

Not much else going on right now. Once again, I'm going to say that I'll try to update this more often, and hopefully there'll even be interesting stuff for y'all to read!