SivekMedia.com

Nice, but what's behind the profiles? Image by M. Keefe on Flickr.

Journalism and media students – and, in fact, all soon-to-be college graduates – are faced with a depressing job market and intense competition for the positions that are available. It might seem obligatory for faculty to do everything possible to help their students succeed professionally when they leave the university. But I am concerned about the growing emphasis on personal branding as a means of achieving that success and its consequences for students’ personal and intellectual growth.

Personal branding is increasingly touted as a way to conceptualize your everyday work, to delimit the projects you undertake, and to market yourself as a producer of unique projects that reflect your distinctive mindset and skill set.

This strategy is often mentioned these days as a way for journalists – and students hoping to enter the media professions – to distinguish themselves from their competitors for jobs and freelance assignments in an insecure and limited market.

I’m planning to discuss this concept with students in my media classes next semester. I know many other journalism and media professors are doing the same: encouraging students to envision themselves as experts in a particular area that they both like and see as marketable; to pursue more knowledge in that area; and then to market themselves as unique resources on that topic through blogging, for example. I’m struggling a bit, though, with the ethical ramifications of doing that.

Dan Schawbel, who runs a personal branding blog and wrote a book on it, has this advice for college students:

College student: A college student is interested in either getting an internship, starting a business or getting a corporate job upon graduation. They have to compete on experience and network extremely hard in order to get a job. They need to position themselves as superior relative to their peers. This means, becoming a leader in college organizations, meeting as many people as you can, forming a personal branding toolkit and starting when you’re a freshman are critical to your success.

So, according to Schawbel, this personal branding process begins with someone who is about 18 and who is probably still figuring out what major to pursue, not to mention what to do with his or her life. (Schawbel actually says high school students should have been working on personal branding already, especially for college applications.)

Teaching more than the rules of the game...what's the game for and about, anyway? Image by Intersection Consulting on Flickr.

I had the luxury of entering the university as an undergraduate with a semester and a half of Advanced Placement credit. I worked part-time off campus, but still had the opportunity to take more courses for fun in a broad variety of areas than many of my peers did. I took Italian. I took fencing. I took geology. I did a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Useful? Not so much. But really fun, and personally enriching.

Had someone I respected – e.g., a faculty member – strongly encouraged me to narrow down my self-concept and pursuit of knowledge, and told me I was unlikely to get a job in my desired profession otherwise, I don’t know if I’d have felt as willing to experiment with a variety of courses and ideas. Already, students at our university are having to whittle their coursework down to the bare minimum due to budget cuts, tuition increases and restricted course offerings. Is it fair for me to suggest that they confine their intellectual pursuits even further?

Clearly, there needs to be a balance between preparing students for the job market (what’s left of it, anyway) and encouraging them to think of themselves as more than employees or producers of stuff. They need to realize they are also thoughtful individuals with intellectual contributions to make as well. Simply forming students into products with distinctive brands – yet more commodities to be bought and sold – diminishes the act of teaching and the nature of the university as a place that values critical insight and deep thinking.

Although we all want students to graduate and embark on personally and professionally satisfying careers, can we address the challenge of “marketing yourself” in a way that retains the intellectual substance and personal satisfaction that are found through experiencing all the university has to offer? Particularly, students still need courses and assignments that cause them to think critically about the professions they hope to enter so that they aren’t simply becoming marketable automatons who produce whatever is most in demand at the moment, without regard for their work’s greater ramifications.

I think that for me, this balance will take the form of continuing to teach a critical perspective on media and journalism, inherent to all my courses, and also assigning tasks specific to helping students understand how they will attempt to position themselves personally in the media professions. These tasks would involve sincere reflection on the nature of the work they want to do and its fit with their beliefs, motivations, and desires. They need to be sure they actually fully understand their work and the consequences of their “brand,” and that they aren’t entering a profession or marketing themselves in a way that is in fact contrary to their personal beliefs. Such projects might intervene in students’ push for professional achievement so that they become thoughtful, ethical professionals who will ultimately be proud of their life’s work and will have made a contribution to their communities and society at large.