…responded with beautiful, heart-wrenching accounts of the job search that we have published in four parts: The Unemployed Speak and Advice from Employers, Longer Voices of the Jobless, and What It’s Like to Be Jobless in Your 20s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There were several bits from unemployed twentysomethings. \u00a0I’ll feature one of them today:<\/p>\n
“I want to blame the universities and grown-ups who should have known better. Instead, like my me-first generation, I blame myself.”<\/p>\n
Subject line: MAD AS HELL<\/p>\n
I’m only 23 and it’s been barely over a year since I graduated from university. Yet already the work environment and the consequences of the “real world” have warped and degraded me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Not to bag on the kid excessively, but dude – what did <\/em>\u00a0you expect the adult world \u00a0to be, anyway?<\/p>\nAll I have are feelings of disillusionment and betrayal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
“Betrayal” implies trust. \u00a0Who – outside of yourself – did <\/em>you trust when setting out into the world?<\/p>\n\u00a0I work full-time at a temp position that under-utilizes me. I make sure not to finish work to quickly, for fear it doing so will only shorten my employment. Before that I worked in retail. Before long, I may end up back there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Perhaps that’s one of the advantages of coming from a place – the rural Midwest – where nobody really expects much of you, or an unranked obscure little college that imparts no academic mythology on you to change your mind on the subject – but on the one hand, that’s life, and on the other, if you approach it right, none of it’s wasted. \u00a0In my various travails, I worked as a temp, and some awful temp jobs at that – but it was where I learned to use a PC, back before everyone learned it at birth. \u00a0Just saying – if you use that time at a miserable job to takeaway the parts you need, it’s not wasted.<\/p>\n
Much of my rage is reserved for a predatory system of higher education and the failures of a generation that came before. I’m angry that a “state” university costs as much as it does. That many, if not most of the students who attend, treat the experience like a 4-year version of MTV’s Spring Break. Massive grade inflation means one less standard deviation between myself and those who don’t try. Lax entrance standards means that even in smaller classes, half of the students do as little as possible, have nothing to contribute, and see learning as a necessary evil, if even that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And now we’re onto something. \u00a0The education bubble is a real thing, gobbling up immense capital, while spitting out a lot of students who have failed to learn the most important lesson one can <\/em>learn from a degree (that’s not intended as a direct entree to a career, like engineering or nursing or computer science or whatever) – how to think<\/em>, to analyze and solve a problem that one isn’t innately equipped to solve, and how to know what one is really about.<\/p>\nThen there’s the baby boomer generation. Guardians of the state, they have left it dysfunctional. Watchdogs of the economy, they have let it burn.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Well, yeah, but…no. \u00a0We’ll come back to that later in this series.<\/p>\n
But most of my anger is reserved for myself. I pursued a “Liberal Arts Degree” in communications rather than a B.S. in engineering or computer science. I spent all four years at a state university rather than the first two at a community college. I worked in the summer instead of getting an internship. I worked harder at my classes than making contacts and networking with professionals. Not everyone is suffering in this economy, and if I were going to college for the first time this fall I’d know how to prepare. But I didn’t at the time and now I’m left to face the consequences.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And while the kid in question has picked up the odd bit of wisdom here, he missed out on something that, perhaps, only comes with experience; life is not a crap game where you cast your die at graduation<\/em>. \u00a0It’s an endless (well, not end<\/em>less, but you know what I mean) game of hold’em, where the terms and parameters of the game change, sometimes radically, in the middle of the game – and then you’re on to the next hand. \u00a0And if you’re smart, you don’t let a bad opening hand spook you.<\/p>\nThat higher education today doesn’t make sure kids know that – and equip them to deal with it – is one of the great failures of our system.<\/p>\n
More on Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’d have never thought so at the time – but one of the best things that ever happened to me was getting fired from my first radio job when I was 17. I’d have never thought so at the time. \u00a0My first radio job was – not to be overdramatic- the first great love of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22755"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22786,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22755\/revisions\/22786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}