| Feb. 11, 2010
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| Courtesy photo |
| Rosemarie Overstreet studied and eventually settled in Europe for her career. Though a trend now, her travels "threw the IU program for a loop." |
“I think I threw the IU program for a loop when I told them I wanted to go overseas,” says Overstreet, BA’84. “To me it was just a necessary step in my preparation.”
Overstreet did end up studying abroad that year, in Germany, and she hasn’t looked back. Her decision to bypass the traditional channels of a career in journalism may have puzzled her college classmates and advisers, but now it seems visionary. With that bold move, along with her journalistic training at IU and a graduate degree in international communication from American University, Overstreet was crafting a set of skills that would help her stay relevant, even as the old model of journalism crumbled around her.
Overstreet’s career has included freelance reporting assignments for ABC News, a stint as a production assistant for ABC’s Sam Donaldson during Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration, teaching appointments, and various roles as a producer, writer, editor and translator for media campaigns by international corporations and public relations agencies. She has produced travel documentaries for PBS, and she consults on content for English-language Web sites in Europe.
Overstreet spoke by phone with reporter Ben Weller, MA ’07, from her home in Germany about her unique career path and the changes and challenges of the new media landscape.
You’ve had this sort of sprawling career, doing lots of different kinds of work for different kinds of clients. How do you define yourself as a professional?
I’m a journalist first and foremost. Ever since I was a little kid I’ve always wanted to have something to do with writing. There are some people who say your career finds you, you don’t necessarily choose it, and I think in my case that’s what it was. As early as grade school, I always enjoyed writing and telling stories. I’ve always seen myself as a writer. I’m a journalist and I was able to sell those skills or make those skills work at quite a few different places.
You went to Europe in high school, again in college and graduate school, and then following graduate school you went back again. What gave you the confidence it takes to excel not just in journalism but in a media environment quite different from that in the United States?
I knew that I had skills and I just thought, “If I can find someone who wants my skills, I’ll be OK.” I’m not saying that I came over with a backpack like some guitarist and then the next morning I was like the next Jimi Hendrix. But 20 or 30 years ago, the only way you could think about having a career overseas was if you took this traditional career path of putting in time at a daily and then hoping that you might get placed overseas. I didn’t want to wait that long.
How did you get into corporate communications?
In my grad school program you absolutely had to do an internship overseas. American [University] had some connections and I had some offers. I liked some of the offers better than others, but they really wanted me to go do corporate communications at IBM. I wasn’t so keen on that position because I thought it didn’t sound very exciting; but I ended up saying yes to it, and it ended up setting all kinds of other career opportunities in motion.
I went and spent four or five months looking into corporate communications, but from this international perspective. I was working with Germans who were journalists, but they had very different backgrounds. We had all these conversations about journalism and I began to see that it wasn’t this black and white field.
You’ve gotten a chance to see the changes in journalism and media from different viewpoints, both as a journalist and as a media consultant. What should students graduating now be doing to prepare themselves for the new face of journalism and communications?
When I went to college, I was sort of coming in at the end of an era in journalism. There wasn’t the Internet, and it was pretty black and white in terms of the careers you could have — you were going to go to print and work at a daily or a magazine, or you were going to do broadcast.
I am sure that now for every person who is graduating and is thinking to themselves, “I’m going to go online and report for Slate,” there’s another person coming out going, “I’m really not sure what I want to do, but I know I want to write and I know I want to bring ideas together.” And I think what really needs to be told to some of these people is, “You know what, if you’re flexible and you’re a bit creative, you can take your media skills and you can take your journalism degree and parlay that into a lot of different fields.”
It seems to me that in the ’80s, that was far more narrowly defined. Some people are saying the newspaper is dying and that everything is drying up; but I think there are so many opportunities that require the kind of skills you can get from a journalism background. They’re not just your typical newspaper, television, broadcast kind of jobs. You just have to be open and flexible.
You definitely took some risks and followed an unconventional path. Looking back, was it the right move?
I suppose if I were a career counselor, this would not be something you could sell to a student. Some of it is luck and opportunity. But I’m very certain that if I had stayed in the U.S. and worked at a daily, the opportunities that have laid themselves out in front of me just wouldn’t have happened. I often wonder what would have happened, but….
Are you happy with how it played out?
Oh, yeah!
Final advice for journalism students?
One thing I think is really important in your four years of getting your degree is to spend some time abroad. Whether it’s backpacking, or if you can parlay it into some sort of internship, it’s really important to spend some time overseas. Any American who thinks that life can happen without being aware of what’s going on beyond America is in denial. Whether it’s the products you buy, or the money you invest, or the leaders you elect, the world is much more connected now than it was in the 1980s. I think you can only gain on your resume if you have experience abroad.
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