People are looking for jobs. Employers are looking for people. We see this dance at the same time every year. Taiwan Panorama has itself recently been looking to fill an editorial position. We began to get inquiries almost immediately, the most entertaining of which was, “This is a laidback job, right?”

Setting aside the would-be applicant’s apparent attitude towards employment in general, the question exhibited a profound misunderstanding of the nature of print media work.

Frontline reporters deal with tremendous pressure and turnover is high. Though journalists are typically academic overachievers, the simple fact of having done well in school has little bearing on someone’s ability to handle the stresses of the job. Résumés and interviews offer equally little insight into how well an applicant thinks and writes. As a result, many young people enter the profession only to discover they aren’t cut out for the work.

While reporters certainly need to write well and to be able to integrate information into a narrative, they also need to be the kind of person who can elicit information in the first place. Interviews rarely go smoothly: interviewees can dissemble in a variety of ways, claim they don’t have time to talk, refuse to discuss a given issue, give tangential answers to questions, or offer hyper-truncated responses. And even after completing an interview, long hours of writing remain, hours that often drag on late into the night. The pressure grows as your deadlines loom and the production department begins harrying you for your piece.

If you don’t enjoy interacting with celebrities, scholars, experts, and strangers, and don’t possess a sense of mission, you’re unlikely to be able to handle the deadline pressure. If you want a laidback job, please, please don’t become a journalist.

If, on the other hand, you are curious about the world and concerned about what’s happening in it, journalism makes a wonderful career. Reporters get to visit places most people will never see, to hear passionate researchers share the fruits of their life’s study, and to keep up with the cutting edge in a variety of fields.

Unfortunately, young people tend to have very unrealistic expectations of work. And while the “it” job of the moment has varied over the years—technology, television, and high-end restaurants have all had their moment in the sun—students have all too often failed to see through the fantasy, to appreciate the hard work and even tedium their “dream job” is likely to entail.

Most Taiwanese are familiar with André Chiang, the Taiwan-born chef whose eponymous eatery has been ranked among the top 50 restaurants in the world. But few realize that he toiled for two long, unglamorous years at a restaurant in France, washing, peeling, cutting, and cooking potatoes for 15 hours a day. The experience taught him to judge the water content of a potato and how best to cook it simply from its feel in his hand.

When business owners lament that they can’t find qualified employees even at salaries of NT$35,000 per month, it’s clear that our employment problem goes beyond a lack of jobs. In an effort to bridge the divide between studentdom and the working world, National Taiwan University has begun placing more emphasis on providing its students with career guidance. The school’s College of Management is now working with alumni to create internships for students to enable them to better understand what tech companies and traditional manufacturers really do.

Taiwan has been slow to implement career education programs. In fact, I know any number of people born in the 1960s who have never stretched or applied themselves and to this day remain unaware of what their strengths are. I know others born in the 1970s who found their “dream jobs” to be far different than they had imagined and eventually ended up starting their careers over from scratch.

Having schools help students think about who they are and where they want to go in life is crucial to helping them actually get there.