I got my first job when I was 15. I worked just a few hours per week at our local library, shelving books. Even while I had other jobs, graduated from high school and started college, I continued to work for the library, eventually moving up to a supervisory role (it was a very small library).
When I started college I was a radio / television / film major and took several courses in this area before switching to English (I really wanted to be a writer), and then to journalism. I moved to Canada about six months after I graduated with my journalism degree because I’d met my now wife and she lived here.
When I couldn’t find steady work as a journalist in Toronto (we lived there for a few years), I went back to school for another year to get my degree in education (with an emphasis in teaching health / PhysEd and English at the high school level). During the interview for my first teaching job I mentioned what my initial major had been and when they hired me it was to teach one English class and two video production classes. I suspect that’s why I got the job.
When we moved back to Saskatchewan I had trouble finding work as a teacher so I went back to school to get my masters degree. Early in that process I met one of my mentors and good friend Rick who got all excited about my qualifications as a potential research assistant. My qualifications? It turned out that my part time work in the library and training in journalism likely meant that I could find my around journal databases and write in coherent sentences, which I could.
Fast-forward in time to 2020 when I launched my podcast. The conversations with guests have come easy to me in large part because of my background in journalism (even though I was in print, not radio).
A couple of weeks ago I was in a meeting at work about the potential for our unit to launch a podcast and I was turned to for my advice on several aspects of the process.
So, I’m advising on this because I did my masters with a professor (Rick) who hired me as his research assistant (and later recommended me for my current position) because of my background in education, journalism, and library work. I’m where I’m at today because of a very winding path that included living in one state (California) and two provinces (Saskatchewan and Ontario), at various points majoring in radio / TV / film, English, journalism, and education, either myself or others around me seeing how that winding path lead me to being able to advise, support, create, and see the possibilities that the path may still have for me.
