Perhaps I can offer a little comfort. I graduated from Mars Hill 55 years ago. And I and my classmates left with anxiety. The nation was at war in Korea. Political tensions were rising as the nation prepared to elect a new president. Asia seemed to be a quagmire. The Cold War with Russia was getting increasingly frigid. And there was talk that the boom that followed World War II was over and we couldn’t expect the same rate of growth in the future.

So here we are 55 years later. Everything is different and yet everything is the same. Problems are everywhere. But so is opportunity. What do you do? You plunge in.

I have been a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland for a dozen years, and at the end of every semester some of my students graduate, and their worries are almost identical with those of the previous graduating classes.

How do I get a job in a tight job market? How can I speed my way to a top reporting position at The New York Times or The Washington Post? What are the short cuts?

Every semester, my answers are the same. Start on a small daily newspaper. There you can see the newspaper industry in microcosm. If you aren’t getting answers when you mail out your resumes, stop writing and start showing up in person. Managers at small companies are usually too busy to answer a lot of mail. Some don’t have secretaries. So you show up at their offices at eight or nine in the morning and tell them you are prepared to stay in town all day if necessary. You’ll wait until they have a coffee break or have lunch or until the end of the work day. Most prospective bosses will be impressed with your initiative. Often, if they don’t have a job to offer, they’ll call around in your behalf.

I tell my students to pick out ten papers in the same state and call on them, one a day for two weeks. I have never had a student who didn’t find a job if he or she called on as many as ten prospective employers. Once, a promising young prospect told me she couldn’t follow my advice because she didn’t have a car. She couldn’t, she said, go from town to town. I suggested she buy one of those thirty-day bus tickets that will let you go anywhere in the United States for a month at a fixed price. On the third day she called. And she said, “What do I do now, coach? I got a job on my third stop. And now I have 27 days left on my ticket.”

The principle is the same whatever your career path — high technology or advertising or banking. Be willing to go where there’s a job. Start small. Learn the basics before you move on. Don’t think about shortcuts until you are well grounded in the fundamentals of your profession.

My first job in journalism was with my hometown newspaper, The Goldsboro News-Argus, which then had a circulation of 9,000. I started as farm reporter, writing a daily column called “Ramblin’ in Rural Wayne.” I talked to farmers and their families every day. I wrote about the first cotton blossom of the season, the first tobacco harvest, farm wives who cooked banana pudding to die for and family reunions and church socials. My city slicker friends in Goldsboro, population 25,000, laughed at my writing a column called Ramblin’ in Rural Wayne. How was the ramblin’ today, they would ask. But I stuck with it. I learned journalism from the ground up.

More than a decade later I was a New York Times correspondent in Vietnam during the Tet offensive. I heard vague reports of trouble in Hue and made my way there by truck and helicopter. I found that the marines were surrounded and held onto only two blocks of the city. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces held onto the rest. Each day, after marines were reinforced by fresh units, they re-took two or three blocks of the city, only to lose most of it again during the night to enemy troops who re-infiltrated into houses during the darkness.

It took about 10 days for the marines to get 10 blocks or so from their headquarters compound. When they did, they found several American advisors who had been hiding under a house since the night the enemy overran the city. They had little water, even less food, and were hanging on by their nerve ends when the marines broke through.

The marines took the survivors to the headquarters compound and, to give them a sense of security, put them in the safest place they could find — a bunker dug deep into the center of the compound. I heard about the survivors and went to interview them. I snaked over some sandbags and entered a tunnel. I crawled a bit, rounded a bend and dimly made out some human forms.

“My name is Gene Roberts,” I said. “I’m with The New York Times,” I said. “I’ve come to get your story.”

Out of the darkness came a voice, and it said “Hey, did you ever write the ‘Ramblin’ in Rural Wayne’ column for the Goldsboro News-Argus?”

You have every reason to be optimistic as you set out in the world. I cannot imagine a better basic education than the one you have received at Mars Hill. If you are not going on to graduate school, look on your first job as a continuation of your education. Worry more about what you are learning your first year or two than what you are receiving in pay or status. Those will come if you master the basics.

And have confidence in the future of our country. It is an astoundingly resilient nation. We have survived recessions and depressions, wars and assassinations, terrorism and domestic upheavals.

Our nation will remain resilient, I am convinced, so long as we are faithful to the basic principles of democracy. Our democracy is more than majority rule. It is respect for minorities. You may lose an election, but you have the right to try and try again. You have the right to speak even if what you say runs counter to the popular wisdom. True democracy is the right to practice your religion, but it is also the right of everyone else to practice theirs, even to the point of having no religion if that is what they choose.

Democracy thus far has not worked in the Middle East, other than in Israel, because the focus has been on majority rule, not on minority rights in politics and religion. True democracy is built on tolerance. There is no more stark contrast in societal values than between India and Pakistan. They received their independence at the same time; but Pakistan was founded upon a single religion, Islam, while India was founded upon religious and political diversity and is open to Hinduism and Christianity and Islam and to those who choose none of these. India is a tolerant, diverse and functioning democracy while Pakistan struggles with autocracy and religious intolerance.

In our book, “The Race Beat,” Hank Klibanoff and I dug into the life of Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish scholar who was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation in 1937 to do the most comprehensive study ever of race in America, especially of white supremacy. He had more than a hundred other scholars helping him. He did three years of field work and was horrified by the depth of poverty and fear that white supremacy had generated in black Americans. When World War II began he was drowning in more than 15,000 pages of research and groping for a way to synthesize this into a book.

Then Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. Believing that Sweden was next, he put the research aside and arranged to return home with his family on a ship that was laden with dynamite and traveling through U-boat infested waters. It was his duty, he felt, to fight for his country. But to his amazement, he found when he arrived in Sweden that his country was not preparing for an invasion; it was openly courting Nazi Germany and seeking an accommodation. And to make sure it didn’t offend Germany in any way, it began censoring the press.

Myrdal and his wife were outraged. This simply would not happen in America, they knew. For all its problems with race, America had an outspoken black press with scores of papers operating both north and south without censorship of any kind. He thought Sweden could learn from America, and he and his wife wrote a book, “Contact with America,” to acquaint Swedes with American values. Almost all American citizens, the Myrdals wrote, believed in free speech and a free press. Americans respected other viewpoints even when they strongly disagreed. As a result diverse ethnic groups were living at peace in America while Europe was tearing itself apart.

Writing the book in Sweden gave him the insight he needed to return to America and finish his book on race. He would call it “An American Dilemma.” And in it he would include his belief that Americans were bound together in a common set of beliefs that he called the American Creed — a sense of fair play and respect for different voices, different religions and different ethnic backgrounds. He would conclude that white supremacy existed at least in part because the mainstream press in America was not covering it, only the black press saw race as news. If Americans across the nation really understood what was happening, Myrdal believed, they would be shocked and shaken and demand change — because the realities of white supremacy differed so sharply from the ideals of the American Creed. It would take years for the white-run press to start covering race, and when it did, Myrdal’s insights were proven right. America was shocked and shaken and it did demand change.

We have a long history in America of correcting our course when we stray from our beliefs. We did it on women’s rights, on the rights of black Americans, on workers’ rights and on economic freedoms. Previous generations have put us back on course and protected diversity, dissent and religious freedom. Now it is your turn.

There is much to contemplate as you embark on a new life. Mars Hill has prepared you. And now the future is yours to shape. I wish you well. Thank you for inviting me to speak.