Affection for connections: They can change your life

I will be graduating from a four-year college this May, and then attending graduate school for a B.S. in journalism and communication. My trek from undergraduate school to graduate school would have been a longer, more arduous task, if it weren’t for my friendly little sidekick – the connection.
The connection is an almost blessed occurrence in life and most of the time we aren’t even aware of it as it’s happening, much like a severely-repressed memory only discoverable by means of appearing on an episode of Dr. Phil. The connection sits and waits to spring up at an unexpected time and then sends us ahead of the pack like a nifty little convenient ladder shortcut in the ever-so popular children’s game.
Two years ago I impressed one of my journalism professors with a series of news stories I wrote in her class dealing with the shortage of flu vaccinations. She said that the university’s school paper needed more writers like me and that I could easily get hired. That’s connection one.
Some time passed and I got hired at my university’s paper. After writing there for a semester, the same professor told me she was impressed with my writing yet again, and that I should try to get an internship at my town’s newspaper. She dropped a few names and after I left the room as giddy as a teenage girl who just caught a glimpse of her favorite boy band lead singer, I contacted the editor of the paper. That’s connection two.
After a couple of interviews, I got the internship at the paper. I wrote almost 100 stories that summer that now fill the pages of my portfolio, I ate a few too many doughnuts, I got that much-needed, sometimes-hard-to-get “thing” called experience, I made a lot of other connections that may help me in the future, and I met the public relations director at my college at an event I had to cover. Let’s call my town paper connection three and the public relations director connection four.
Going back to school my senior year after the internship, I came with a lot of confidence. I wanted to do more than just the school newspaper and freelancing for my town’s newspaper, so I contacted the public relations director I previously met, asked him if I could help out his department, and got a job as a public relations writer for my university. You guessed right – that’s connection five.
Previously this year, I started searching for graduate schools and after picking one, I knew I had to get an assistantship. (Tuition wavers are always nice.) I searched through the lists of available assistantships full of computer lab attendants and professors’ aides and then the holy grail of assistantships crossed my eyes; it was to be a public relations writer for my graduate school’s PR department. I submitted my résumé, waited, waited some more, took some naps, ate some food, went to school, checked my e-mail far too many times and low and behold I finally got a message back.
The PR director from my future graduate school knew the PR director from my undergraduate school and thus, another connection helped me out. Connections are why we should never burn our bridges or disregard somebody because they can’t help us right now. The more people we know, the more help we can get and the more opportunities we may be given, so hey, contact me some time and make some more connections because just like Forest Gump’s mother said, “You never know what you’re going to get.”