Media Studies Why?

                                          ema                  Media studies why?

Let me tell you a true story [only no names are real] i was once dating a woman called Norma, her daughter Jane was coming up to university age, hence the house was filled with prospectuses, she announced one evening,

“I want to take a degree in media studies” after a short while i picked up the prospectus and read through the course, to me most of the course involved watching old movies such as Citizen Kane and then writing a thesis on the film, it seemed to me at the time to be a waste of 2 years of life just watching films.  Great if you got a job doing it at the end of the course, but how many jobs are really in the media?

The young lady in question Jane was convinced her career path was in film or television [who doesn't want to be on television?] now the tricky part came about, Jane had very good grades when she left ordinary school at 18, she applied to every university in say a 50 mile radius, they all said the same thing “We are currently over subscribed to this particular degree course sorry”

Guess what it seemed allot of other teenagers wanted to watch movies all day and make comment [sorry for the sarcasm and any offence taken by people in the media] so she had to widen the search area, please bear in mind she lived with her mother in greater London, she eventually found a placement in wales! for people not familiar with the U.K. its around 200miles from London!

I am told she finished the course could not find a job in the media and now works on a check out in a local supermarket!

Should parents take a more active role in helping to chose a teenagers career path? I’m not sure i haven’t been blessed with children yet.  The film industry is shrinking and changing drastically, cinemas are closing down people are downloading films from the net sometimes illegally, the industry is shrinking as is the world.  Have a look at the credits on new released films these days, look at the makers or the sponsors if you will, its a joint effort these days could be Paramount with Working title films with Film 4, etc etc money is scarce and film producers want to share out the production cost as much as possible.