When summer is gone, off they go. They are the interns who have undergone a full summer swing in a media organization of consequence. Not all media outlets are given the privilege of internship of mostly third year students of Bachelor of Arts in Communications or better known as mass com. The Bohol Sunday Post is a paper of choice among mass com interns from the Holy Name University as soon as the school started producing future media practitioners. It may be because its editors are flexible in their treatment of rookie journalists. In our case, if all those who hurdled the rites of passage as an intern all succeeded in having a diploma of their chosen degree, then we can say without fear of contradiction that the Bohol journalism community should have experienced a glut of future journalism graduates. But where have all the interns gone? Have they shifted courses when they are on their last year in college?

We don't want to believe that this is happening. Because if this is the case, why choose this kind of course when the time to make it is during the start of the school year of the course of their choice. There may be students who choose to quit enrolling in the particular course during their first year but they are only a handful, if at all, there is any. Human experience teaches us that once you made the choice for a course, then it will be for good. So we expect that from first year, it will be all the way till graduation. But the situation on the ground is not what we expect it to be. While we expect a surplus of mass com graduates since the years we accommodate interns in order to produce an army of potential journalists, the reality is that not a single applicant for media employment have we entertained in our outfit. We consulted other media firms in Tagbilaran which also accommodated interns many summers back but the same answer was all we got.

It may be true that there were interns upon graduation who succeeded in landing employment as media persons in some Cebu TV stations and daily newspapers. But are they that many? Well, they can only be counted in our ten fingers. How about those who remain at home? If our experience is the basis of employment, then the fact that we have not encountered any applicant in our paper, it goes to follow that they must be employed somewhere but not on the course they have graduated. We would like to believe the observation of our editor, Mike Ortega Ligalig. A graduate of the Silliman University College of Mass Communication, he said in his batch of more than 40 mass com graduates in year 2000, he is the only one employed in a media company. He lost track of his Silliman contemporaries but one thing sure, they are not employed arising from their chosen career. Now back to the local products being churned out as soon as the first batch of graduates received their mass com diplomas. As articulated earlier, nowhere are they employed in the local papers and broadcast stations. If so, where are they now? Nobody can really tell where in heaven's name are they employed. Whether they ended up as salesladies in our malls or caregivers in some foreign lands it does not matter anyhow for as long as it is borne out of honest employment.