Attending Andrew McGill presentation for the Journalism Speakers Forum, was a very interesting experience, especially being a senior who will be graduating at the end of the semester I was able to take a lot of learning points from the presentation as he talked about his career since graduating from Penn-state. I think one of the first things that really sticks with the audience is how he introduced the saying “There’s No Train and No Stations” which gave a nice introduction and theme for the presentation, explaining that in your career not everything will be linear, in fact it wont be in a line at all and the path that one will pursue willl be full of surprises, twists, turns and he proceeds to explain how that can be a good thing.
One thing I learned as well is that there are a greater willingness from companies to accept college graduates to work straight out of college, and that is because the barriers to entry has been lowered, which can ultimately affect also my future, and hearing this kind of things can be very motivating for the students that are listening. In fact it stood out to me that later in the presentation Andrew proceeds to advise the students to not be scared to applying to big companies, because any opportunity is important even if it feels off track, because it opens other doors. I believe this is true since, we always hear success stories especially at these seminars of people becoming successful in fields that wasn’t their first choice.
It’s always interesting to listen to the lives of the alumni who have graduated from the same communication school as you, I believe it reinforces that known belief that Penn-state will remain part of the student’s life, seeing Andre McGill speaking pushes me to hope that one day I graduate I get to come back and give a presentation here at Penn State, maybe 5 to 10 years from now. Being a telecommunication major and watching this presentation that mostly focused on the journalism world, was still very inspirational and I believe it definitely helped with my choices for the future, and I think the lesson that I took away from the presentation, was the fact to experience jobs and opportunities that might feel different from what you want, because you can never know what kind of path it can bring you because in your career there are no trains and no stations.