Your Plan-B is my Plan-A!

By Tehmina Qureshi

 I felt a surge of anger as the girl, sitting beside me in a workshop, described her saddest moment when asked by the moderator. She said that not being able to get admission in a medical college on merit. So, she came to Mass Communication instead! Journalism, which has not the remotest connection to medicine, was her second choice. It was her plan-B.

 Same is the case with about 60% of the people who come to study Mass Communication. In my batch, out of 40 people, more than 30 are girls. No offence to anyone, but approximately 25 of them did not intend to study Mass Communication at all. For many of them this was their second choice, after medicine or any other field. There is another girl who took admission and studied for a whole year. A year later she sat for the test for medicine again, and left. Apparently she wanted a place to spend her "farigh" days and she did that at the cost of someone else's place on merit for admission in Mass Communication.

In the workshop I talked about earlier, almost all fell down to social sciences after their merit fell short for medicine. Almost every girl's saddest moment was not being able to study medicine. All I wanted to do was jump from my chair and ask them why in the world didn't they try again? If they were doing it because of family pressure then shouldn't they be glad that they were saved by fate from studying something that they did  not want to for the rest of their lives?

  For these girls, journalism maybe just another subject to study to have a degree. For me it is something I want to do for the rest of my life. My plan-A, is their plan-B.