I’m 27 years old. College did not prepare me for the real world
It’s a running joke that millennials are unemployed or underemployed because they get useless degrees (more explicitly, this disparaging comment goes after “women’s studies” degrees). Let me dispel that immediately; my bachelor’s is in physics.
In my first-year-seminar course, our professor had us do an experiment on a smartboard by plotting what our expected post-college salaries were. The point she was trying to make was that the women in the class would expect lower wages than the men. Though she was able to make her point, I created an outlier — the lowest expected salary on the graph (I think I put something like twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars). To be fair, both of my parents are now retired theatre professors, so you can see where my expectation came from. She retorted with something that has stuck with me:
“No one in this class should expect anything less than $40,000 a year.”
This is a lie that was perpetuated throughout my youth, all the way through elementary, middle, and high-school: Degree equals job. It was drilled into my head endlessly, using class periods to calculate how much you need to survive and comparing the salaries of high school graduates vs. college graduates. With a natural science degree, and the lie in my head, I assumed it would be easy to make a forty grand salary with my problem-solving skillset.
But this summer, I will have been out of college as long as I was in college, and I never even came close to that bottom line set for me in my freshman year.
When I graduated from my Minnesota school in 2017, I stayed in the Twin Cities for a few months applying to jobs, assuming somebody would bite. I started applying before I even graduated. So what opportunities was I offered? I had one interview with a company that worked with 3M. Shortly after that interview, they decided not to hire for the position at all. I interviewed with a company that hires for science jobs so they could eventually find something that fit for me. After a few months I emailed the man I interviewed with and he said he still didn’t have a position for me. Then I interviewed with a temp agency. They found me a job: a two week position at the University of Minnesota bookstore restocking shelves and filling book orders. No opportunity for advancement or extension. Finally, I had the last interview I would have in my time in the Twin Cities, at a local McDonald’s. You know, the kind of job that is seen as a failure in the American zeitgeist.
At this point, I left the city I grew to love and call home. The truth is I was literally dying from alcoholism, part-fueled by a crippling panic disorder, part-fueled by my apparent unemployability. This was also the reason that my girlfriend at the time had left me. McDonald’s had offered me the job, but I needed help, and there wasn’t any reason to stay in the city anymore. I’ve worked in the fast-food industry before, and it’s a fucking nightmare (seriously, fuck anybody that say’s “burger flippers” don’t deserve a living wage). I would rather remain unemployed than do it again. So I made the demeaning decision to move back in with my parents in small-town Iowa.
That was early 2018. Three years later and I’m still here.
Some time after I got sober in September that year, I started applying to jobs again, as well as grad schools. I applied (and continue to apply) all over the country. And I am continuously either passed-up, or ghosted altogether.
Right now, I work part-time at a coffee shop in town, and it’s good for where I’m at right now. I like my coworkers and I know the boss personally. But it’s not where I want to be, not what I worked really fucking hard for four years of my tiny life for. I also apply to graduate programs, hoping to improve my prospects, but no dice there either. To be fair, I’ve only applied to a handful of schools so it’s no surprise, and I’ll continue to apply to other schools. But one thing that really helps with grad school applications? Professional experience…
So where did I go wrong? Is it my resume? Well, I use the same format that I did for an assignment, and was approved by one of my professors. In my mock-interview I was told I did very well. I even applied to (and was rejected by) a research position with a former professor. I was never professionally prepared for years of rejection and silence after hundreds (probably thousands) of job applications. I expected to have to wait to start my career, but not four years.
No wonder my whole generation is seemingly bitter, defeatist, and nihilistic.
Now it feels too late. I’ve been out of college so long, I don’t even feel like a physicist anymore. I’m forgetting everything I learned. Maybe that’s the problem; I’m too far removed from college to be useful in a scientific setting with too many gaps in my resume.
And to be honest, I’m in a pretty privileged position. My parents paid for my rent those few months I remained jobless. I had a house to come back to and a support system to help with my addiction. I don’t have any college debt because my parents are professors and I got a tuition exchange. And I’m a white man. How much worse would a similar situation be for a less privileged person?
I’m not even sure all of this has a point. Maybe I just need to get the words out into the aether so that applying to jobs wont make me as sick to my stomach anymore. Perhaps I’m waiting for someone to say, “No, no, no! You’ve been doing this all wrong!” or, “I’m sorry no one ever gave you a chance. Why don’t you come work for us?”
Maybe I’m unlucky, or maybe I did this to myself. I just wish someone would tell me which one it is. Or maybe I should have swallowed the student debt and gone to art school. Maybe then I wouldn’t feel like I wasted my twenties.
