While we’re on the topic of student loans and the lifetime of debt college grads will face, here are some informative articles and resources to peruse (find a paper bag and try to remember to breathe slowly and evenly).
The crazy surge in med school applicants has finally triggered several new medical schools to come into being. Apparently there was a dry spell during the 80s and the 90s. Now is the time for every new and terrified college grad to take a good look around, figure out which professionals manage to avoid being laid off (garbage collectors and doctors), and decide whether to get a job now (not the best plan, I heard even 7-Eleven isn’t hiring) or kill some time in medical school while the economy works itself out.
It seems there is an actual shortage of physicians in this country, as well as a shortage of medical school spots. Starting up a few more medical schools seems like a viable option. But let’s not go overboard. Printing more money doesn’t save anyone from an economic crisis (have we learned nothing from all this higher education?).
I’m all for more doctors, especially if it means more people to help who are worth a lot less money (we can’t pay all the doctors six figures…I hope). But my spidey senses are tingling about the less-than established medical schools letting everyone in and churning out Twinkie-shaped doctors. Oh, well. I’m sure America’s lawsuit fettish will finally pay off and the physicians educated at MD mills will soon be weeded out.
Wait! Here comes the optimism (better late than never). The new medical schools will be less fraught with tradition, status, and red tape and they will work hard to teach their med students well. These new and excellent doctors will go on to stellar residencies and splendiferous careers in medicine. Babies will smile and Baby Boomers will be cured of their age-related ills. The soundtrack will rock and the montage will be poetic.
According to Time Magazine, this has been the decade from hell. Awesome. I’m going to cross “survive a crappy decade” off my list right away.
One could argue the point that it’s going to take us all a while to clean up after a decade this bad. College is too expensive and won’t help anyone to get a job in this economy, so why spend next year working too damn hard at school and the job you have to hold down in order to live somewhere other than a van down by the river?
I would suggest, to the college students (or recent college graduates who still haven’t found a job), that taking a gap year might not be a bad idea. Getting out of the country is the most expensive portion; you’d be surprised by how little money a traveler willing to rough it can subsist on, especially if one avoids Europe.
For inspiration, you can read Cody McKibben’s post over at Thrilling Heroics, in which he wraps up the year he just spent living in Thailand.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
How unfair is it to have gone through 13 grades of school, done everything better than anyone else, been involved in an unreasonable number of activities, been the high school valedictorian, gone off to George Washington University, graduated magna cum laude from the GW business school, applied for dozens of jobs and been turned down for every one of them?
You can read the article in the Washington Post about Melissa Meyer, who is currently living back at home with her successful parents, getting no end of s**t from her successful siblings, and is trying to come to terms with the nearly unacceptable fact that doing everything according to The Plan for a Super Successful Adulthood has not worked out in the slightest. If you string out the factual bits in a line, you’ll see that they go against every property of matter and all laws of nature and physics.
She works the counter in a record store selling CDs and incense and spends her nights working as a hostess in a restaurant. She’s killing herself trying to find a job; she shot for the starlit jobs all GW business school grads are expected to apply for, and is now mucking about in the bottom of the barrel along with all but the handful of fellow GW graduates who won the For God’s Sake, Please Hire Me lottery.
She’s been at it for months and is wanting to take the universe’s big fat hint and just go be something else for a while. Travel that’s totally unrelated to success is her goal. She has certainly paid her dues and moved as many mountains as she could find. Life is short, and rarely works out the way you planned it. I hope she can let go a little and can have a grand and wholly deserved adventure.
Smooth Harold, Blake Snow’s alter ego/blog, has an outstanding list of the 50-Most-Common-Interview-Questions-and-Answers. It’s so good, having access to it makes me feel like a naughty little cheater. Knowing at least fifty of the questions an interviewer might throw at me, as well as solid advice on how I should go about answering them intelligently, reduces my stress level significantly (I prefer not to be caught off guard in situations where everyone is watching me and scoring how well I jump through hoops, climb vertical rock faces, and leap over nether-region-clenching chasms).
I’m not currently on the job hunt, but the Gen-Xers (my people, dude) were cursed several years back when some think-tanker told everyone that we would change jobs and careers a stupid number of times throughout our professional lives. Which basically means that by the time I’m in my sixties and will (hopefully) be a decade or so away from retirement, I’ll be able to interview my parents and my grandparents under the table.
Of course, they will either be already dead or nearly there, so some will argue that it’s not going to be a fair fight. Whatever. I’ll be so cranky about having to switch career paths and jobs every few years that I will no longer give a flying rat’s ass about the obsolete concept of “fairness.”
And what I meant by all that was: Woohoo! Interviews! Go out there and interview your asses off, people! Forward motion is good, and knowing you can nail several of the questions the suits in the tiny room will want you to answer with inimitable aplomb and captivating perfection is such a chest-swellingly marvelous feeling. It’s so good, it’s probably addictive. It’s also totally legal, so go nuts.
Ah, autumn. Students are somewhere between ankle- and knee-deep in the new school year. Which makes parents across the nation breathe a big fat sigh of relief because the kids will be mostly out of the house for the next nine months. Except for the unfortunate few who’ve completed their primary, middle, secondary and higher levels of education and were then spit right out into this charming economy. Sucks to be you, pal.
It also sucks to be your parents; they were this close to having a kid-free home. If you’ve recently arrived on the safe shores of your parents’ front steps, you can coast for a while on parental love and sympathy. But that will not last, and if you don’t show some major effort with the Job Hunting Task of Doom, they’ll get cranky.
When the ‘rents begin to act oddly, they’ve probably read this article and are trying to get rid of you. It’s not because they don’t love you; they love you unbearably much but would like to continue to love you, which is why you have to move out as soon as is humanly possible.
College Scholarships.org has the bad financial news for college students explained simply and graphically below. The immediate effects of student loans are explained, as well as the long-term effects (the ones you thought you’d be done thinking about that many years down the line). I’m hoping that the nationwide foreclosure situation has educated everyone as to what happens when people are allowed to borrow beyond their means.
I get it that paying for college so you can have some decently-paying career options is a big fat Catch-22 as well as a vicious circle. It also just plain sucks a real lot. However, it’s still better to have the information prior to heading into the jungle. No one’s going to make you use the info, but it’s good to at least have it back there in your grey-matter archives, just in case.
Paul Kimelman, a reader and sometimes inadvertent guest blogger over at Freakonomics, asks whether or not there’s a direct correlation between kicking ass academically and then going on to achieve success in the real world.
It’s a great post and it made me think about the tremendous value we tend to place on the paper measures of success, i.e., grades achieved or money earned. Rarely do we look at the whole person and quantify their levels of happiness and contentment, or how many of their own goals they’ve achieved to determine how successful they are in life.
I myself am a recovering overachiever, and I therefore try very hard to not put insane amounts of pressure on my kids. It’s a fine line and I’m still working out the kinks in the system. I have to somehow get it through to my first-grader that completing the homework assignments are expected and required, while allowing her to do said assignment in her own way.
I don’t want her to obsess about perfection, but I do need her to understand that no one gets to waltz through life avoiding the drudgery entirely and sticking with only the super-fun bits. As a human in the Race (be that Rat or Great) she’ll be expected to contribute. But I would very much like to avoid beating the coloring-outside-the-lines instinct out of her; I love it that she prefers to do things a little to the left or right of center.
How do you instill in a person a solid work ethic and the concept that her own goal of using every color in the crayon box is just as important as completing the illustration assigned in the homework? There’s no paper measure or value in society for turning in a meticulously colored homework assignment. Her Mom and her teacher may think it’s cool and may appreciate it, but it’s not like there’s an extra point column for enjoying the assignment and using every color. A correct and completed assignment and some stellar test scores are the only proof of success available to school kids.
So will thirteen years of primary and secondary education form her for her higher education career, in which GPAs and test scores will be her personal-value metric? And what happens after college? Will she do what most adults do and transfer her success-pursuing energies immediately from grades to money? How do I instill in my offspring the idea that doing one’s best in school and in the professional world is important, but that a 4.0 and a million dollars are by no means the be-all and end-all?
Dammit. This is one of the drawbacks to being a thinking higher mammal cursed with the ability to ponder oneself into oblivion: you can think yourself into a sucky little dark corner wherein false optimism and pure, unadulterated denial are the only way out.
Well, I think my work here is done. I’m sure I won’t screw my progeny up too badly and that they will have a higher-than-average chance of growing up happy and then blossoming into well-adjusted, deliriously happy adults who wake up every day just bursting with excitement for the day ahead.
Regardless of who you are or what life situation you find yourself in the midst of, there are bound to be some misery-infested moments. School, work, and just plain day-to-day life have wretched bits that bring on the urge to shake your fist at the sky and demand some answers.
If every day, all day is like that for you, then I would suggest some changes. But if the unpleasant moments are just threads running through a solid, generally happy and contented life, you’ll be fine and can take the advice of Sergeant Felipe Perez (Williams College ’99) to “Embrace the Suck.” You can read his post on his blog, The Accidental Soldier, at his Alma Mater’s blog, EphBlog, or below.
Army port-a-potties the world over (I can speak to the US, Germany, Kuwait, Qatar, and Iraq, at least) are full of some of the crudest, funniest, and wisest graffiti ever. My personal favorite, scrawled or scratched into at least one potty in ever place I’ve ever been, is “Embrace the Suck.”
“Army Strong,” “Army of One,” “Be All You Can Be” aside, “Embrace the Suck” is the real Army motto. The wisdom is simple and powerful. War sucks. Soldiering sucks. The Army sucks. Deal with it. Get over it. Accept it. Embrace it.
I think I’m close.
Just came back from 5 days in the woods. Slept in the dirt. Got rained on. Tore my hands up taking machine guns apart in the dark. Got real stinky. In short, it sucked.
But on day three or four (we lose track), we had hot chow trucked out to the woods. It had stopped raining. The sun was setting behind the North Carolina woods, through a break in the rainclouds. The truck was blaring 80’s R&B as they pulled up, and we convinced them to open the doors and turn it up. Before long, plate full of lukewarm spaghetti in hand, funky buddies at my side, and bad music in background, I was as happy as can be. It wasn’t long before our pint-sized First Sergeant started screaming about something or other, but it was wonderful while it lasted.
Better yet, last night, our field days over, we rolled back into the FOB. I’ve never been happier to see broken showers, a crowded tent, and a dining hall full of bland food. I’m learning to embrace the suck.
Catch-22 is safely ensconced in my top ten books list; it’s been there since I read it over a decade ago and I can’t imagine that it will ever be demoted. It’s such a perfect, perfect description of being caught in some bureaucratic, red-tape moment wherein the powers that be are unmoved by your pointing out of the obvious, utterly effed-up impossibility of your situation. You’re screwed because you’ve managed to find a special little corner of Rule Hell in which the guidelines contradict themselves and now there can be no forward or backward motion that might enable your extrication from the situation.
The job-hunting process can definitely be heavy on the Catch-22 nuances. This is especially true for the newly graduated. Your brain is packed full of (mostly) worthwhile information, but you lack any real job experience. Employers would prefer not to hire someone who has ridiculous amounts of knowledge but few real-world job skills. This realization usually makes the young job applicant scream (on the inside) something along the lines of How can I get any job experience if I can’t get an effing job, you freaks!
And there it is: you can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job. Right out of college, you pretty much have a diploma and some summer job experience to bullet-point on your résumé.
And that is why god created the internship: the unpaid, coffee-fetching rite of passage that won’t make you much money but will teach you how to do the job you want so badly that you’re willing to work for free to learn how to do it. Internships are also invaluable networking venues; connecting with pertinent individuals in your field will be beneficial to future job searches and career moments.
Searching for internship opportunities is pretty similar to the job search process: search for “internships” on any job search site and a list of possibilities will magically appear. Alternatively, you can apply for an actual job, and note on your résumé that you’d like to be considered for the little- to no-pay internship version of the available position. What fool employer would turn down someone who’s willing to work for free? (This may not work in the law, medical or air traffic control fields).
If you’re still in college and are financially fortunate (or are really good at being poor) you can use the summer to do an internship. It’ll give you an extra bullet point on the résumé and will give you a better idea of what a job in your chosen field entails and whether you actually want to continue pursuing this career. Colleges and universities always have some informed person (librarian, career advisor, department secretary, etc.) who can hook students up with internship links, info, ideas and lists.
