I’ll admit it. I’m worried about finding a job.

As a junior, I don’t have to face the job market just yet. But as a journalism major, I will soon be trying to enter a field that is busy downsizing and reorganizing just to stay alive.

I’ve wanted to be a journalist since I was 12 years old, and I am not ready to abandon my reporting dreams in favor of a secure paycheck in a different field. I am too young to settle.

I know I’m not the only student facing this stressful and pressure-filled situation. No matter what struggles we encounter in the job market, worrying is not the best way to deal with them.

Worrying is unproductive. It causes stress instead of alleviating it, and it stops us from enjoying life. Worrying won’t improve a resume, create job experience from thin air or increase the number of jobs available in a given field.

Broken down this way, worrying is, in fact, quite pointless.

In an effort to calm the worries that were filling my mind, I considered following some “mom advice.” My mom frequently writes me e-mails. She called one of them “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” suggesting that I apply the approach of that song to my hunt for a paid internship at a newspaper.

It seemed like a nice, optimistic approach, but like most parental advice, I found that it was valid only to an extent.

Sure, being happy is great. But with the dismal economy in mind, I knew a smile alone would not get me a job, no matter how much happiness it reflects. To survive and thrive in the career world, I knew I had to do more.

So I took the well-intentioned advice from my mom and changed it. The version that is stored somewhere in the back of my mind and on a Post-it note on my bedroom wall reads, “Worry less, do more.”

No one can afford to have a carefree attitude about the job market. No one can expect to find the perfect, meaningful, well-paying career without research, effort and preparation.

Internships, resumes and grade point averages may be more important in the job hunt now than ever before.

And so is having a plan B (and a plan C and a plan D) in case the perfect job or internship turns out to be unpaid or gets cut completely from a company’s staffing plans.

So those of us who want a career in a competitive field must step up our career preparation and tone down our worries about situations and decisions that are out of our control.

We must make our job qualifications and application portfolios as strong as they can be and leave them to serve their purpose and find us employment.

It’s scary, and despite the mom e-mail saved in my inbox and the Post-it note on my wall, I remain far from at ease about the job market. It has been difficult to let go of the worries that have for so long consumed my thoughts about my future in journalism.

Still, I have realized that the best way to deal with an uncertain future is to prepare for it and see what happens. To worry less and do more.