Stu­dents want­ing to learn about careers in media received some tough love at Career Ser­vices’ Careers in Film and Tele­vi­sion event. The panel fea­tured three Prince­ton alumni, who spoke about the tra­jec­tory of their careers and then took the time to answer ques­tions and offer advice to the stu­dents gathered.

Kather­ine Car­pen­ter ’79 was the first to address the group. A doc­u­men­tary film­maker, Car­pen­ter showed a clip of “Bones of Turkana,” the National Geo­graphic spe­cial she co-produced. She then spoke about her work with the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel, which she joined in its early days. “It was just really fun to work in the early days of cable where every­one was just mak­ing it up as they [went] along,” Car­pen­ter said. Fun seemed to be the dri­ving force of Carpenter’s career; she had got­ten involved in media after notic­ing that press teams on the cam­paign trail always had a good time, and from those begin­nings she became an award-winning pro­ducer with an Emmy to her credit. (Not bad for a com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture major who didn’t give tele­vi­sion a sec­ond thought in col­lege!) Though she always fol­lowed what she thought would be enjoy­able, Car­pen­ter had some words of wis­dom for the crowd: “Write the scripts, change the toi­let paper, you need to be will­ing to do every­thing.” Her expe­ri­ence had been that skills in writ­ing and Excel were espe­cially use­ful in the field.

In con­trast to Car­pen­ter, Sandy Kenyon ’78 started look­ing at media careers when he was six­teen years old. While at Prince­ton, he joined a fel­low student’s radio pro­gram, “Focus on You,” and became so involved that school­work was an extracur­ric­u­lar in com­par­i­son. Kenyon said the indus­try prizes endurance and offered his per­sonal opin­ion and this anal­ogy: a finance firm, Kenyon said, will put you through four days of excru­ci­at­ing inter­views before giv­ing you a hefty pay­check, but the film indus­try will put you through five to seven years of 80-hour weeks before pay­ing you a pit­tance. A career in film and tele­vi­sion, said Kenyon, is for peo­ple who “love it deep enough and wide enough and long enough.” Kenyon also warned about the pos­si­bil­ity of burn­ing out or becom­ing unmar­ketable after ten years, though he said he’s been lucky. Early expe­ri­ence doing film reviews in his career led him to his cur­rent job, doing con­cise movie reviews for ABC that air in New York City’s taxicabs.

A more recent grad­u­ate, Josephine Decker ’03 was able to talk about film and tele­vi­sion as it relates to her job as an inde­pen­dent film pro­ducer. Like Car­pen­ter and Kenyon, Decker said that hard work and ini­tia­tive was key. After work­ing as a pro­duc­tion assis­tant, she has moved onto other projects where she has more cre­ative con­trol. How­ever, these projects require a wider knowl­edge of film­mak­ing and han­dling items such as pub­lic­ity. When asked if she would rec­om­mend film school, Decker responded that what’s impor­tant is choos­ing a path that will address a filmmaker’s spe­cific strengths and weaknesses.

In all, the pan­elists agreed that fol­low­ing one’s pas­sions would yield a dif­fi­cult but reward­ing path. Film and tele­vi­sion careers may not be for every­one, but for those that don’t mind hard work, they are attainable.

For more infor­ma­tion about careers in the arts, visit Abbey Racelis, career coun­selor for arts, non­profit and pub­lic sec­tor (and mod­er­a­tor for this panel). And if you want to improve your social media lit­er­acy (a valu­able skill accord­ing to the panel), make sure to RSVP to “Do You Pass the Social Media Recruit­ment Test?” on April 16.