What is... a PROFESSIONAL

What is… (to be determined)?

So here’s a section much like the previously begun “Why I…”

Like everything else in our blog, we haven’t a clue what it’ll become, but here we go.

What is a professional?

I was talking with my mother this weekend right after we had launched the blog when I noticed the adsense stats said we had made $0.85.  We made 85 cents!!  I quipped that we were now professional bloggers, and to my mother’s delight she joyously proclaimed she now had something to tell her friends. 

Then I thought what makes someone a professional? 

This seems like a simple question, right?  A professional is someone who does something regularly for a fee that requires specific skills.  Right?

On my first day of drama school at Carnegie Mellon, I remember a professor starting his welcome by saying we were all now professionals and welcome to the profession.  At that moment I thought, “if I’m paying to attend, how does that make me a professional? Professionals get paid!” 

So I decided to see what the dictionary might add.

From Merriam-Webster website:

Professional: of, relating to, or characteristic of a profession, or engaged in one of the learned professions. 

Learned professions: a calling required specialized knowledge and often long and intensive academic preparation.

So did I just spend three years, acquire $200K of debt, to be a professional blogger about spending three years and acquiring $200k of debt?  Love that circular logic.

Most of the artists I’ve known seem to say you become a professional once you get paid.  Okay.  I like that.  However, before law school, I got paid doing odd jobs, selling t-shirts, building sets, selling computers and even painting.  Yet I would never call myself a professional at any of these activities (especially painting, because that skill seems rather illusive).  Whenever asked I’d say “I’m a professional actor, but this is how I’m paying my rent.”

How many of us have said these things before? 

Well, if it makes my mother happy to say her unemployed overeducated deeply indebted son is a professional because he’s been paid about enough to cover the electric bills for the time spent online blogging, then great!  For you mom, I’m a professional.

So for all the mother’s out there, I say let’s embrace that definition and apply it all around.  I will now consider all those people who work, in whatever field they are employed as professionals in that field. 

Therefore here in New York City, that means every waiter is not only a professional actor, each bartender is not just a professional musician, however every Barnes & Noble employee is still just a professional graduate student.

So as we continue our search for work, share with us what you do as a professional.   What’s your profession?