29
Jan
2010
More Coaching…(21.02.10)
I meet with former schoolmate Lyndsie Bourgon to hear how she got to be more successful than me…
“My standards have dropped to anything involving words,” says Lyndsie, sitting across from me at a Toronto diner.
Lynds is a King’s College journalism grad. We met in our third year working on the school paper, The Watch. She, as one of the editors-in-chief, and me, as an arts editor.
Lyndsie’s cute as a button, with matted-down blonde chin-length hair and a shy school-girl smile. The best part about her? Despite being successful, she’s completely non-threatening. For a journalism grad, she has an odd sense of altruism towards fellow struggling journalists.
We met last week, along with our friend Ruth, the other editor-in-chief for the Watch. It was like an unemployment sandwich. Yup, I was in the middle.
Though I think we all wished the state of journalism had been frozen in time like the plastic booths and retro bar stools around us, Lyndsie has been pretty successful (so has Ruth, but will save that story for another rainy day).
In November, Lyndsie landed a gig as assistant editor at Yahoo!. Pretty good in the midst of lay-offs and newspaper slashings.
It wasn’t an easy haul.
She moved to Toronto in July, and did “four months of solid application writing, every single day.” Lynds landed some interviews and soon became used to hearing “You were in our top two, but…”
Her interviews for summer internships with the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star sounded downright scary (A general knowledge test with too many blank spaces, and an answer to the question “What do you want to do here?” that totally bombed), so she stayed afloat with corporate copy-editing and freelancing until she heard about the Yahoo! gig.
Should I get glasses?
If Lyndsie stumbled to find her footing, I’ll probably fall on my face.
At university, while I spent two months of my life writing an average five-page article about graffiti for the Watch, Lyndsie wrote a feature about new security measures for LSAT testing that won her an award for CUP (Canadian University Press).
She did a summer internship at Canadian Living after her third year of school and the next summer, interned at the newswire Canadian Press in Halifax. Then (my favourite part!) she traveled for ten months in Europe, working, WWOOFing and taking a break (although she did express slight regret over not doing ANOTHER internship in that time. Oh journalists…).
Over beer and grub, we catch up on the goings-on of our other contemporaries. One’s at CBC, another in New York and a handful up North doing the make-more do-more journalism thing.
As for Lyndsie, she updates certain pages of the Yahoo! website (“Tech, and most unfortunately Pets”) as well as running a twitter account, assigning stories to bloggers and editing. It’s a job, with words, so she can’t complain.
And, as she puts it, “We probably graduated at the worst possible year for getting jobs.”
I believe her.
Speaking with Lyndsie makes me nervous. Hearing about her qualifications, and failed experiences getting work at the big papers, makes me think my journalism prof was right when he told me, nicely, I didn’t have a chance in hell getting an internship at the Star.
Lyndsie even orders better than me: her sweet-potato fries look way more appetizing than my beet-tomato soup.
“Oh, Lynds,” I say with a sigh, probably looking extremely desperate.
“You’ll be fine,” she says. “The best advice is don’t take anyone’s advice.”
Even on ordering food?
(Are you doing something else than living at home looking for jobs? E-mail me! I’ll probably write about you…)