What was your major?

Kiplinger’s just came out with a list of the worst college majors in terms of getting employed after graduating.  Unfortunately, a lot of them would be considered very creative career choices.  Here is the link to the list that includes unemployment rates, average salary, job growth, and (my favorite) likelihood of working in retail.

http://money.msn.com/personal-finance/10-worst-majors-for-your-career

And here are the top 10 worst college majors:

10. English

9. Sociology

8. Dram and Theater Arts

7. Liberal Arts

6. Studio Arts (painting, sculpture and other media)

5. Graphic Design

4. Philosophy and Religious Studies

3. Film and Photography

2. Fine Arts

1. Anthropology

I wasn’t surprised by most of these, although I didn’t expect to see Graphic Design.  I did expect to see my major, Journalism (my emphasis was in editorial, which meant I wanted to be a newspaper reporter).  It was hard enough back in the day to find a reporter job and now with so many newspapers going out of business it’s probably be even harder.  Plus, in my opinion, the quality of work done by journalists today, especially television journalist, is appalling bad, really, really bad.  My journalism degree did help me get jobs in other semi-related fields such as advertising, public relations and marketing (which is what I’m doing right now). 

Around my senior year in high school the only thing I was really interested in was writing.  I had a GREAT language arts teacher who was encouraging.  I had taken a creative writing class and was on the school newspaper.  I thought I’d have a better chance of getting a job with a journalism degree than with a creative writing degree (which isn’t even offered everywhere).

My senior year in college I interned at the Windsor Beacon (Windsor, CO), which has since been bought by Gannett, graduated and spend 9 months looking for a newspaper job before landing in southeastern Colorado at the Rocky Ford Daily Gazette.  That was the one and only journalism job I ever had (it lasted about 3 years – and that’s another story for another time).  While I did work at the now defunct Rocky Mountain News, that was in the advertising department.  Today, many, many, many years after graduating college, I don’t think I would want to go back to reporting but I do enjoy creative writing and hope to have some success with that.