Graduate Donkey
The high school years are probably the best years of adolescence, for many of us, and I would be lying if I said that they were not for me as well. I would also be lying if I said that I was a good student in school, and that I had high grades in all subjects. Never... I was mediocre, I always had other passions that robbed me of the time dedicated to learning, but one of these passions was reading and, this made me one of the best, if not the best in the class of Romanian language and literature.
I liked to read, I had a rich imagination, just like now, and I always took the maximum points in exams, with my very well elaborated essays. I probably saw what others did not see in the literary works I was studying, and I was not just a nerd for that subject. The teacher appreciated me and my grades reflected all of the above.
After I finished high school I was totally confused about the higher education I was going to do, because at that time in Romania almost everyone was studying higher education and I was planning on doing the same, but very few professed in the chosen field after graduating. The first college I enrolled in was like picking it up like a ball at a bingo game. Or choosing like a drunk man. I dropped out after the first semester and returned home. I didn't know where I was going but, I liked the life without responsibilities I had, and I knew it wouldn't last very long.
In the summer of 2005, I made the decision to study Journalism, and I enrolled in this college, which I graduated with the lowest grade in the entire class of 2009. You will find out why, at the end of the post. I thought that if I liked literature, and that if I wrote very good essays, I would be a good journalist, and maybe I would have been, but nevertheless I did not practice this profession even for a second.
In 2006 I started to study Journalism, I was very enthusiastic both by the college I was attending and by the student life I had. The first year passed very quickly, taking all the exams I had to take, having the most fun in the university campus that I could, just like many others, and then followed the vacation between the first and second year of college. I don't remember how I spent this vacation, but I remember that I wanted to do an internship at a newspaper in that city starting with the second year.
The second year of college started running very fast, the parties were running almost the same pace, I became a pretty famous DJ on the university campus, and before you know it I was close to the second semester of the second year of college, and wasn't yet “doing time at any newspaper”. At such a party where I had been invited, to put out some good vibe, came a colleague of mine as well, a very good student who was already showing signs of becoming a good journalist, and a role model for me for that presumably future profession I would had.
He was already doing an internship at a local newspaper, and I started asking him questions about the subject, thinking that I should start my internship as a young journalist as well. He told me a lot about his activity as an amateur journalist, while emptying countless glasses of vodka with lemon juice, and at one point he mentioned that almost any news that saw the light of day, through that paper, was at one point truncated by the editor-in-chief, as he wished, often truncating the truth.
Basically, the ordinary editors worked for hours every day, to write newspaper articles full of information and objectively written, while in the evening a fat editor, bored as fuck, smoking a yellow cigarette, and holding a cheap pen in his hand, to cut absolutely everything out he wanted and to truncate any article, in the way he wanted, actually serving the financial interests of influential people, or political parties that did not want their image tarnished by a zealous journalist. Serving the $ not the truth and the people buying their trash.
This inside information turned my stomach upside down, and was the turning point on my path in becoming a great journalist, and the man of truth willing to share it with the world. I would never have accepted such a thing and I would not do it now, no matter how much I was offered. I hate corruption, I hate the fact that the media has become the fourth power in the state, and the way it manipulates public opinion, and I would not be part of such a branch for anything in the world.
Reason for which my diploma thesis was entitled "MANIPULATION TECHNIQUES IN THE WRITTEN PRESS FROM ROMANIA", a paper that was not appreciated at all by my coordinating teacher, and for which I got the lowest grade, when I took the graduation exam in 2009. At that moment I was not even interested in whether I would graduate or not, because it was clear to me that I would not practice this profession, but I still wanted to show the world of media, especially the written press, that I know how it spins, and that I am not afraid to expose its undersides.
Hence I consider myself a graduate donkey, an incorruptible one, because in the end I graduated from a college that was useless to me, and will never be useful to me, but I was so stubborn, just like a donkey that he refuses to go where his master wants, in writing and publishing what certain masters of media publications want from him. Can't pay me to serve, can't drag me on any road you like. I'm an ass and I will die as such...
Thanks for attention,
Adrian
