I did everything I was supposed to do. I graduated high school with honors, completed college on time, and went on to earn my Master's degree in a field that I loved because I've been told my whole life that the only thing I was expected to do was follow my dreams. While I didn't have to until adulthood, I've been a part of the workforce since I was 16.
I've made it to the age of 27 having never been arrested, pregnant, or overdosed. And yet, myself and what some estimate is as much as half of people in my generation are out of work. Many of us have crippling college debt to shoulder on top of the other rising costs of living -- rewards for an investment we were promised would pay off yet so far has not. If education were any other product on the planet, millions of young people would qualify for a class-action refund. (Aside: don't get me wrong. I wouldn't trade my education for anything. Knowledge is the answer to every problem, as far as I'm concerned. But if college is no longer what's required for a career, it needs to stop being billed by educational institutions as such so that people can make the right choice for them based on what they want to achieve, not what they're made to fear they lack.)
Yet we're not asking for a handout or anything we didn't earn. No one by any means owes us work. We want to work and feel valued yet many I've heard from -- brilliant, highly-trained people that have put a lot of effort into their degrees and certificates -- can't shake the feeling that they would have been better off doing little-to-nothing for the past handful of years because at least then they'd have themselves to blame for their lack of perceived success being, well, successful. Despite working so hard at being what we were expected to be and staying out of trouble, we're now reaping the same benefits as someone who didn't try half as much. At the very least, if flipping burgers for the first few years after school until you can break into your career is the new norm, the world needs to stop looking down at flipping burgers and jobs like it.
The Occupy generation is portrayed as lazy and ungrateful when really all we want is a chance. That, and maybe just an acknowledgement that things are pretty far left of fucked up right now and that we and our peers didn't do anything to deserve it. Of my close circle of friends, I can count two that have had success in their fields. One is a pilot, a highly-trained and specific skill for which he still had to work for years teaching beginning flight students at minimum wage to earn. The other put herself through law school, followed by a graduate library program, was near starving broke the entire time and only found a position when she moved to the other side of the country -- about a thousand miles away from her family and everyone she knew.
The rest, if they even have jobs, have abandoned the fields they care about for things like cable installation technition and medical billing specialist. There's nothing wrong with those jobs, but I'm sure if they were told a decade ago that's where they'd be after attending top schools, they would have applied directly to those positions and saved themselves monthly student loan payments for the next 20 years.
Of those I know in my field from the program I completed, the ones I know that are doing well already had years of experience before deciding to get their Master's. The one-year grad program I attended cost roughly $80,000, and that's on top of what many spent moving here from all over the nation to attend.
For the past year and a half or so since I finished graduate school, I've had very little success finding any kind of full-time work. Despite countless applications and about a dozen interviews, all I've managed was a short, part-time, minimum-wage internship in my field and some administrative [making copies] temp work here and there. Don't get me wrong, I'm exceedingly grateful for the opportunities I've had, but the constant rejection when I know I'm a highly qualified canditate is more than a little too much some days.
This blog will be a chronicle of my adventures in trying to get a job and the various and sundry bullshit I've run into being an office temp. Like the endless sea of desperate applicants that washes over our good ol' amber waves of grain -- too numerous to do anything with really, yet bothersome when they stack up to a certian size -- these are the temporary internet files.
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