Tis the season of discontent for undergraduates across the country. Some have degrees in hand. Others have a couple more years before they enter the workforce. The prevailing mood on campuses, at least the ones I've visited recently, can best be described as grumpy and a bit... uncertain.
Students are asking questions that previous generations rarely had to consider. Will there be jobs in my field? Does a degree still provide an advantage? Is an internship enough? What happens when AI can perform some of the work I was trained to do? How do I pay off my student loans?
These are not abstract concerns. They are a regular feature of conversations in classrooms, coffee shops, dorm rooms, bars, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Students have a lot of thoughts about job postings on LinkedIn, by the way. "Scams," one student claimed.
Trust has never been lower in traditional platforms. Sentiments are so low in fact, commencement speakers are getting booed off stages across the country during graduations. People are pissed – and students are not happy about AI.
In Mike Foley's journalism class at University of Florida, one fed-up student simply stated. "AI sucks. If your company uses AI, I won't do business with you."
And there are good reasons for the mood. Recent graduates are entering one of the most challenging hiring environments in years. Entry-level hiring has slowed while internship competition has intensified. Employers continue to ask for experience while offering fewer opportunities to gain it. At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence are reshaping expectations around productivity, skills, and hiring across a wide range of professions.
A recent segment by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria explored the growing anxiety among college graduates facing a labor market that feels increasingly difficult to penetrate. The concern is not a lack of ambition or talent. The concern is opportunity.
The students I meet are anything but disengaged. What many of them are struggling to find is a pathway. The traditional internship was designed to help bridge the gap between education and employment. In many cases, it still does. Yet internships have become increasingly difficult to secure, especially in competitive industries.
After a while, I stopped wondering how to improve internships and started wondering whether we were going about it all wrong. If the workforce is changing, why are we still relying so heavily on a model developed for a different era? And, why the hell are we not teaching students to hack their own problems? If you can’t find an internship, make one for yourself. Think like a builder. Let's empower people to break the norms.
Throughout my career, I have worked in newsrooms, startups, media companies, and entrepreneurial organizations. The people who stood out were rarely the people with the most impressive credentials. They were the people who could communicate an idea, tell a story, rally a community, and persuade others. Some launched businesses. Some peeled off and became journalists. Some built brands. Some made films. Some wrote books. Their careers took different shapes, but they shared a common skill: they knew how to create something that connected with another human being.
Whether we like it or not, we are all in media now. Every founder is a publisher. Every nonprofit is a content company. Every small business owner is expected to create videos, write newsletters, communicate with customers, manage social media channels, and explain why their work matters. The technology has changed, but the challenge has not. Attention is earned through compelling ideas and clear communication.
That reality creates both an opportunity and a responsibility. If we are all participants in the modern media ecosystem, then we should understand how it works. We should understand how stories are constructed, how information spreads, how audiences are built, and why the First Amendment remains one of the most important ideas ever committed to paper. A free society depends on people who can think critically, communicate clearly, challenge assumptions, and participate in public discourse.
Those ideas are the heartbeat of WordUp Studio.
WordUp is a studio for storytellers. It exists to help emerging writers, journalists, filmmakers, podcasters, entrepreneurs, photographers, creators, and communicators develop their craft through practice. The goal is not to prepare students for a hypothetical future. The goal is to give them opportunities to create work that matters now, build portfolios that demonstrate their abilities, and develop the skills that will serve them regardless of where their careers ultimately lead.
The future will belong to people who can do more than consume information. It will belong to people who can create it, shape it, question it, and communicate it effectively. Those skills matter whether you are launching a startup, producing a documentary, running a nonprofit, leading a company, or covering city hall. --AC