My colleague Monica has recently started her own blog, as you all know from my previous post. Her first post made me really happy, someone in my class that used to be very close to me, maybe this will bring us closer again, even in a virtual way.

Yet she talked about the deception she had had with Journalism. Been there, done that! We all came at that university hoping to achieve great things, loving every minute of what we did! Yes, we loved the old cameras that would stop working when you needed them the most, we also loved the fact that we were expected to do an amazing job when filming, although we only touched the cameras once a year. We loved processing our first back and white pictures, although they really were not that great. We loved going to press conferences and wondering if they’d let us in and then striving to get something decent written. And then monitoring newspapers and magazines, making papers and projects, learning new things, some more important then others.

And at a certain point along the way, we lost interest in these whole journalistic dreams! Why? When exactly? What was it that made us give up on journalism and find something better to do? I can’t really tell…Maybe certain teachers that had no place being there, while the good ones war badly treated… Maybe the reality of the journalistic world in Romania. Something like that might happen to you when you work as an editor for a press monitoring agency and you see the amount of stupidity in newspapers or when you organize press conferences and see how journalists just copy the press release you translates and prepared in hours of hard work. What second source?

Well, the thing is, we found a way to express ourselves in a blog; write, but not always in a journalistic way. Stay in touch with our skills! The passion and dream was never gone, we just keep it inside, as a dear memory that sometimes was the main purpose of our lives…

My dad once asked me why I wasn’t afraid I’d also loose interest in tourism. Well, I replied, easy answer. I came here because I was interested in tourism, but never expected too much of the university. I just wanted some tools to learn, not mentors!

I was standing in line to day, waiting to pay my second tax for this year (there are enormous queues to pay the tax, especially near the end of the tax payment period), and was listening to this girl in the 3rd year. She was very disappointed in our faculty, said she couldn’t wait to finish. She had been accepted by a state university in Timisoara (she was from Deva, a town much more closer to Timisoara than to Bucharest), but her father said she would have a better future in Bucharest. It was the capital city nonetheless. So she came with her hopes and dreams yet stated all she got from coming to Bucharest was a disappointing school and lots of work that was compulsory to pay the bills.

Another girl asked her to pay the tax for a group mate of hers. She said no! I was a bit surprised at first, but then she continued “We’re in the same group yet he never bothers to say hello to me! I might not have the money to wear clothes approved by the latest fashion judges, but that is really no reason not to say hello to me!” And then I thought she was right not to help him. I would do the same! I was never a fan of the latest trend, simply because I have seen it as the latest uniform…they all had it! So in the second and partially third year of high-school I made not wearing blue jeans my goal! I was never treated like that, but was it because they needed me as I was best (and second best when I was lazy) in the class? Or because I had such a personal style? Who cares…

That story this girl told made me think of something: the Journalism University was the place where you could find the least amount of prejudice! At least in my group! We all were a little crazy/funky at times! And quite open minded! This attitude I miss the most as it really isn’t there at my new school.