Parco di San Bartolo: l'Adriatico a Castel di Mezzo

A professional life. Chapter 1 – Landing in the first job: from zero to bees

(An introduction )
I want to follow the advice of a CEO. Pull in your professional history, reflect on it several times and come up with a captivating report, overtaking a little the boring summaries of a CV. I will take this challenge splitting the story in different chapters. This is the first release of chpter number one. It concern the first step into the professional environment. 

Follow the tag “professional bio” to get all the chapters.

Chapter One
The first job dates back to 2002. By the time, I was attending the fourth academic year in mass communication at the university of Bologna and, staring at my fellow students, I slowly realized that I had a professional network close to zero. Literally, while many friends of mine were already applying for their future jobs, I had no clue about the world out there. No surprise. Till then, I had entirely failed to grab the relevance of the topics I was studying.
I guess two main reasons had brought me to that stage. On the one hand, I had to get used to the fact of living on a city. It may sound amazing, but in those days to me it was new and I had to get used to an unknown world. On the other hand, I had grown up in a craftsman environment in the country side. I used almost to feel guilty about my subject: communication. What was the point of it in the end, why should have people paid me for that? For what, for writing? I took quite some time to get over that stage and sometime I am still revolving around it.

However, I finally moved on. I followed the footsteps of o a friend of mine, Alessandra, and I joined a small team working on the new web world. The team, called “Chiocciola”, was updating two websites: one for Coop Adriatica – Buonpernoi.it -, the second for the Marino Golinelli Foundation – Ticaebio.it -.
I remember my first introduction to the boss, Paola: “Professionally, I am zero. I distributed phone books and I worked in a printing factory. Never done anything before in the communication sphere”. I wonder if it makes sense to be so honest in a job interview. Nonetheless, in that occasion, honesty paid back. I was appointed an internship.

My job was to redesign a civic journalism website – ProfessioneCittadino.it – and moderate the forum. I took it so seriously, as if it had been the dream job of my life. The effort was rewarded. The internship was converted into my first temporary contract. Commonly enough, I believe, the temporary contract implied writing about two topics I knew nothing about: short stories about biology for kids and pieces of news about how to take care of pets.
Pets were the first topic offered to me. I was so surprised by the offer that at first sight I thought it was not for me. “I have a friend of mine studying to become a veterinary” I said. Thanks god, the poor answer did not ruin down the opportunity. “I need someone good at writing”, Paola said to me. A couple of months later, I was writing a full dossier about bee breeding and honey production.

Driving my sister's Panda to the interview sites, I must say I felt a young promising reporter. In a few months I had moved from zero to bees, forging a bright perspective to my professional development. I was so happy and proud that I did not notice the clouds of my final academic essay approaching. Dark times were just ahead. 

(to be continued...)

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