I had the most nightmarish summer job experience this year. I did everything I thought I was supposed to. When I got home for the summer, I didn’t have a job despite everything I had done.

What I did:

-I started early. I applied for jobs over spring break, followed up over Easter break. I don’t go to school close to home, so I had to do all face-to-face work during breaks.

-I applied for over 30 hourly jobs and several internships (both paid and unpaid)

-I applied to a variety of places. I applied to stores that had help wanted signs up. I also applied to amusement parks, which are only open in the summer.

-I was honest and said I was only looking for summer work, but was available to work six weeks surrounding Christmas.

-I was willing to work any hours except Sunday mornings. I tried to sell my extremely flexible schedule.

 

What I didn’t do:

-Apply to camps. I worked at a summer camp the past two summers and it didn’t pay well enough for my plans this coming school year.

-Apply to places that told me they might be hiring in the future or said they would keep my application on file.

 

 

What you should do/What I should have done:

-Make face-to-face contact with the manager of each establishment you apply to. Instead of handing your application to whoever is working, ask to speak to the manager or their supervisor. Introduce yourself and ask what positions they are hiring for.

-Make connections/network! I got two jobs because I had family members somehow involved. Get relatives to ask if their places of employment hire temporary workers. I got a job as a locker room attendant at a country club because my uncle is a chef there. I got a job working the snack bar at a dek hockey league because my brother plays hockey and knew how to get in contact with the owner. With these jobs, I was offered them on the spot with very little questioning about my experience or qualifications.

-Go for quality, not quantity of applications. Apply to places that have a higher chance of you being employed rather than sending an application to three different Panera restaurants in your area.

-Register with your area’s temp agency. I have a possible third job lined up because I applied there. It pays more than minimum wage!

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how through writing, I want to make an impact on others. I want to be a catalyst for change and empower people to work towards a better world. I want people to be affected by my writing.

Lately, I've been affected by the people I am writing about. My life is changing because of the articles I have been writing.

I’ve been writing a lot of articles lately. I always seem to be working on 2-3 articles per week. It’s exhausting, but there is a common theme among some of these articles.

I’ve been writing a lot about homelessness in Harrisburg. When I interviewed Anthony Thomas, co-founder of KNO Clothing, he said at a certain point in his life, he “experienced homelessness at a deeper level.” I didn’t really know what this meant, but it made a good quote to put in the story.

I’m experiencing homelessness on a deeper level now as well. It all started when my good friend said he goes to just sit and talk with some homeless men every Friday with other students from my school. This is pretty typical for my friend, so I didn’t think there was anything unusual about it, until the news editor of my school paper asked me to write an article about what my friend and the other guys were doing in Harrisburg.

I got to meet several men at my school who are passionate about the cause of homelessness. They have slept outside with these men to see what they go through. They talk to them, hear their stories, and put a face to this problem. I have heard stories from my friend, and I heard even more from these other men. I wrote the article as if it were just another routine article about the passionate students at my school.

At the same time, I was assigned to write an article for another school publication about two alumni who started a clothing company that raises money to help the homeless in Harrisburg, KNO Clothing. This also resulted in an article published in the school paper, found here.

All of a sudden, it seemed like I knew so much about homelessness. The students who go into Harrisburg have become a hot topic at my school, as well as this clothing line. I heard so many stories about these people in a city less than a half hour away from me.

I decided to go see for myself on Saturday night with Bethesda Mobile Mission. I got in a giant silver van (big enough to stand up in) to hand out supplies and food to homeless people in Harrisburg in three different places. I was excited to finally see the things I had been writing about and talking about for the past few months. It was completely different from what I expected.

Our first stop was under a bridge that goes over an abandoned industrial area. There was a fence between us and the people there. Someone had locked them in with a chain. We passed them the soup and clothing they requested through the fence, and then we prayed with them.

Homelessness was given a name and a face at that moment. Her name is Stephanie. She asked us to pray, because she doesn’t know how to pray. As we prayed, she started crying. She told us she might be able to get into an apartment after five months on the streets.

Through the fence, seeing the tears streaming down her face, I realized that this is how Jesus would have spent this Saturday night. Despite the situation, He loves her unfathomably.

Kno Clothing

KNO Swinging Bridge Article

Taking to the Streets Article

Blog of the Messiah College students

Bethesda Mission

I’ve been working hard on internship applications and other journalism-related things for the future. That is why I haven’t blogged in a while!

I’ve had to put my journalistic ambitions into words for these applications. I can easily ramble on about what I want to do with journalism in front of my friends or other journalistically-minded people with no problems, but I ran into some issues when I had to put my ideas on paper. Yes, this is strange. I usually can only adequately put my ideas on paper. Not being able to easily express my interests in journalism frustrated me to no end. I felt like I did when I was writing college application essays. I had to fit the essence of who I was into a short essay. How can one 500 word (or less) essay capture my passion for journalism?

I hope this is adequate enough. This is my mission statement.

The basic duty of a journalist is to get information and truthfully present it to an audience in a way they can receive it an understand it. This is being incredibly simplistic, but this is what all journalists have in common.

I’ve heard from many people about how they don’t like to watch the news because it tells of all the problems in the world. The news is depressing. The truth is depressing.

As a Christian journalist, my duty to tell the truth is taken one step further. I have to answer the crucial who/what/when/where/how questions, but in addition to these questions I have to answer:

“Why is this happening?”

“What can an ordinary person do to change it?”

With journalism, I want to combine truth and empowerment. I want to be a catalyst for change. There are so many different paths I could take within journalism and so many of them I find interesting and appealing. As long as I can combine truth and empowerment to be a catalyst for change, I will be satisfied no matter where I end up as a journalist.

I recently had an article published in my town's weekly newspaper. Read here

1. It really helps increase traffic on this blog. I have been tweeting a link to each blog post on twitter and my numbers have increased a lot. Although it isn't any exciting number, the results are exponential. However, most people read just the post I linked to and don't explore the rest of the site. I have a lot of unique visitors, but not page views.

2. You can have conversations with famous people, or just their minions. I posted about a conference I will be attending next month and tagged the conference in the tweet. They retweeted my post on twitter and on facebook. The person in charge of the conference is a big-name Christian speaker, and I know he 's pretty actively involved in the little things, like twitter. It could have been him or the publicity manager. Either way is exciting.

3. You can't have a meaningful or lengthy conversation on twitter. Someone asked me a seemingly simple question. It did not have a simple answer and I didn't want it publicly available on twitter, so I went to facebook chat.

4. It's a great way to get news. I follow several news organizations and I'm better informed about everything than I was before. It takes some getting used to since these news organizations constantly post and it really fills up my timeline page.

5. You get random people following you. It's kind of creepy.

Mark Madoff, the oldest son of Bernie Madoff, was found dead in his NYC apartment today of an apparent suicide.

Suicide in the news or any other type of media concerns me. Not only does a suicide affect the person and their loved ones, but the public has access to it as well. Suicide is a sensitive topic. My involvement in Active Minds had caused me to really delve deep into the topic of suicide and the media. I wrote my paper for my Mass Media class on suicide portrayals in movies.

The Press Complaints Commission  posted general guidelines for suicide reporting. I read four different articles reporting on Madoff's death, and all four were very cautious in the reporting.

The Press Complaints Comission (PCC) says that graphic images and glorification of suicide should be avoided.

At the very least, the articles I read mentioned that Madoff hung himself. Only one went into greater detail. The New York Times' article mentioned what he used and more information on where he was found.

I'm satisfied with the sensitive portrayals I read, coming from an ethical standpoint, but coming from the standpoint of someone who is an activist for for mental health awareness, I'm a little disappointed.

In the age of internet news, there is room for web-exclusive content. The PCC says an optional step for news outlets to take when covering a story on suicide is to list suicide hotline numbers. These stories could have easily linked to information about suicide or suicide hotlines. Why didn't they? Were they concerned that providing more information about the issue would make matters worse? Or were these news outlets trying to get the story out as quickly as possible?

Suicides rarely occur without a preexisting mental illness (90% of suicides result from depression or another mental illness according to NIMH). I'd like to know more about Madoff's last few months, but I can't expect that of the news media to find that out for me, especially when taking into consideration that his family needs their time to grieve.

None of the articles I read offered information or statistics on suicide or listed a suicide hotline. A big concern of reporting on suicide is suicide contagion. When there aren't any graphic details in the story, there is less of a risk of that, but listing that information is one extra sentence.

If Madoff were a more famous individual, I would expect more of the news to responsibly portray the death, but also suicide in general. If an extremely popular singer or actor/actress committed suicide, more people would be interested and read about it, increasing the chances for suicide contagion.

Suicide contagion is more likely among younger people, so when news outlets cover the suicide of a popular singer they should focus more on identifying myths, signs, and treatments of suicide rather than detailed information. Since the average teenager or young adult probably wouldn't be reading a story on Madoff, the coverage is appropriate.

More information on suicide and the media

The articles I read:
USA Today
The New York Times
CNN
Yahoo! News

Throughout the past week or so, many of my friends have switched over to a cartoon profile picture on Facebook, posting this as their status:

"Change your FB profile picture to a cartoon from your childhood. The goal? To not see a human face on FB until Monday, December 6th. Join the fight against child abuse & copy & paste to your status to invite your friends to do the same."

I didn't change my picture because it really doesn't do anything for the cause. I've seen similar things to raise awareness for breast cancer and I didn't take participate in those either.

This story popped up in my twitter feed today about the campaign.

I was surprised to find out that this campaign isn’t backed by any of the major organizations for child abuse, and the US National Child Abuse Prevention Month isn’t until April, according to this article.

The past breast cancer campaigns on Facebook weren’t affiliated with any breast cancer charities either.

It amazes me that these campaigns were so wildly spread without any official organization starting them. So many people blindly jumped onto the bandwagon without realizing that.

Since the cartoon campaign hasn’t proven to actually be about child protection, rumors have spread about how the campaign was introduced by pedophiles in order to figure out which users are children.

For instance, someone my mom’s age might change their picture to Betty Boop or Donald Duck. Someone my little sister’s age might have Spongebob as their picture. The cartoons are intended to show how old someone is. There are flaws in this, though. I know college students who love Spongebob and children may still enjoy older cartoons.

Something about the whole idea of campaigns like this are fishy to me. The bandwagon effect is baffling. I just really wonder who starts these kind of things.

       

I joined the twitter bandwagon. I had a twitter before when I was a book blogger, but a guest speaker in my Mass Media and Society class inspired me to try again. Find me on twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/Sefleischman

I tired something new and wrote an opinions piece for The Swinging Bridge instead of taking on a news article. This piece reflects on my experiences at the Active Minds national conference.

Read it at http://media.www.messiahsb.com/media/storage/paper1242/news/2010/12/01/Opinion/To.Pee.In.The.Shower-3962569.shtml or below:

When I went to the Active Minds 2010 Mental Health on Campus Conference at Montclair State University in New Jersey earlier this month, I thought I'd get resources to help better lead our campus' chapter of Active Minds. I didn't think I would be challenged to look inwardly as much as I was.

The highlight of the weekend was Frank Warren's talk. Warren decided to collect secrets; strangers would send him a secret in the mail anonymously. This turned into a community art project, and Warren has hundreds of thousands of secrets and posts, some of them online, every Sunday at postsecret.com.

Warren shared some of those secrets with us. Some were funny, like "I do a little jig in the stall every time I poop at work, Hey, I get paid to poop!" Others are brutally honest, like "During a binge I ate all of my roommate's food, and she's too nice to say anything."

Warren says the most common secret he gets is "I pee in the shower."

We all have secrets. According to Warren, "There are two kinds of secrets. The ones we hide from other people and the ones we keep from ourselves."

Active Minds is a national organization that seeks to truthfully inform about mental illnesses, break the stigmas and stereotypes surrounding them, and to provide college students with the resources to recognize mental illness and encourage people to seek help.

No matter what college campus you are on, there are hurting people. Linking his talk to the mission of Active Minds, Warren said that in the auditorium we sat in, which was about the size of Miller auditorium in Climenhaga Fine Arts Center, twenty-five people were sitting next to someone who had attempted suicide, and even more people had thought about it.

Everyone who attended the conference received a copy of Warren's latest book, Post Secret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God. Reading this book and hearing Warren read more secrets aloud again showed me how many people are hurting. I came from the conference with a new passion for what I do as secretary of Active Minds at Messiah College, but I also realized the impact of secrets.