Despite the whimsical title of this blog, I do try to avoid whining too much. I don't really like crying out for attention, regardless of what my vague-booking posts may say about me. But I'm actually going to hop aboard the complain train for a while because I'm mad, and goddammit I have a podcast to get to and I need this out of my system before I record.
So I grew up with a pretty simple plan. I followed the rules that were set around me. If I was told, "Do A and you'll get B," I noticed that I got B when I did A. It's kinda been my go-to rule for things. Now, there are exceptions to this rule. When I get spam mail that says I just need to reply with my Social Security Number to claim money from a Nigerian Prince, I have the idea that there's a lie in there somewhere. The risk is too high for me to do something as stupid as send my SSN to people I don't know. Basically, after some risk vs. reward assessment, I decided to play by the rules around me and trust in the rewards promised to me by my elders.
This plan worked really well for me, too. In school, I quickly learned that if I listened to my teachers, I got better grades. And from elementary school through high school, that was kind of how I measured how I was doing in life. My grades were what was important to me. I played sports when I was little, and even got to be my team's closing pitcher in little league, but my grades were what mattered more than anything. Well, that and the approval of my parents, which came partly from the grades.
My primary motivation was this: if I get good grades, my life will be better. Now, I should note that I really had very little in the way of a concrete reward. It was kind of the hopeful fantasy that young children are so ready to have. Probably like, "You can have an awesome job like being an astronaut or policeman or being an author if you do all your work!" So that quickly became my goal. I needed to do what I could in school so I could get a good job and live a successful life.
So let's fast-forward a little bit. I make it to middle school, where the pressure of OMG COLLEGE starts to pile up. By now, it's clear that I'm one of those sad students that cares more about getting homework done and getting my scores as high as possible than they do about having a lot of friends or going to parties. So I'm a clear target for my middle school to give me college prep information. And that's where the message I've been hearing gets hammered into me more: "If you go to college, you'll get a great job and make lots of money. Don't worry about the loans; you'll have so much money that they won't even be a problem."
So I made it through high school with the knowledge that if I get into a good college, I am practically set. I was in all the Honors and AP classes my little college would let me take, and by the end of high school, I had a 4.33 GPA. I had played football all four years of high school (starting on varsity for three of those years), wrestled for three of them (HDL champ for two of those years), and I was on the track and field team for my senior year. Basically, if I wasn't going to your college, it was money issues. Which I knew would happen, because if I didn't get a full ride, I was going to need loans.
So when it came down to it, I applied and got accepted to three schools: CSU Long Beach, Whittier College, and Willamette University. CSULB was my first choice because most of my friends were going there, and it would be somewhat close to where I lived (Lancaster, CA). Whittier was actually closer, and had been recruiting me for football. Now, there was a lot of talk from my father along the lines of, "I can't tell you where to go, but..." which I kind of knew was coming. I know it made my dad proud that I was getting recruited for a college football program. I got the same offer from Willamette. The weather really drew me to want to go to Oregon, and my friends drew me to Long Beach. However, I took a trip to Whittier College, and I loved the place. It was small, it had beautiful architecture, I loved the aesthetics, and it had the ridiculous mascot of the Poets.
Financially, I still thought CSULB was the right choice, but my dad convinced me that going to Whittier was a better idea, primarily because of the football program. I knew the loans would probably run me more in the long run, but "it will be okay, because I'll get a great degree and I'll have an awesome job and I'll make enough money to pay back my loans while living comfortably."
Oh foolish hope.
And here we get to the point of this whole string of story. After making the Move of Shame back home to San Bernardino, I sit and write this blog from my mom's house. During my senior year of college, I lived off-campus, making monthly rent payments through the jobs I had earned from school. I didn't even have Work-Study during that last year because of a cut in our funding, but I managed to get my job back through the extreme generosity of my supervisors in the college's mail room and from my advisor, Charles Eastman. I didn't play football my senior year because of some decisions to fire my O-line coaches, and if I had played football, I wouldn't have been able to juggle the work, school, and sports to the standards I hold myself to.
For those of you keeping score, I played football for three years of college, worked for three years in a few different departments of the college (and I am thankful for every job I had), and finished my degree with a 3.5 GPA. I worked my ass off.
So here I sit, quite unemployed, tippity-typing away at this blog. I wrote the 30 Days of Video Game blog to keep myself writing, and my cousin and I have started a podcast called 8-bit Banter. Neither of these, though, adds money to my bank account in any way. I have my Bachelor's in English, but I've run into the best Catch-22 of all: You need experience to get a job, but you can't get experience if you've had no job. Apparently the three I had at the college don't count for anything to most employers, including the one where I was responsible enough to cover for my supervisors when they could not make it into work.
I've applied to jobs since May when I graduated. I made it to the final stages of a big opportunity with LA County, but was rejected at the last stage. I had connections to a store which was right by me during the past summer, but they were worried that I was too qualified for them and that I would just skip out when something better came along.
So I grew up with a pretty simple plan. I followed the rules that were set around me. If I was told, "Do A and you'll get B," I noticed that I got B when I did A. It's kinda been my go-to rule for things. Now, there are exceptions to this rule. When I get spam mail that says I just need to reply with my Social Security Number to claim money from a Nigerian Prince, I have the idea that there's a lie in there somewhere. The risk is too high for me to do something as stupid as send my SSN to people I don't know. Basically, after some risk vs. reward assessment, I decided to play by the rules around me and trust in the rewards promised to me by my elders.
This plan worked really well for me, too. In school, I quickly learned that if I listened to my teachers, I got better grades. And from elementary school through high school, that was kind of how I measured how I was doing in life. My grades were what was important to me. I played sports when I was little, and even got to be my team's closing pitcher in little league, but my grades were what mattered more than anything. Well, that and the approval of my parents, which came partly from the grades.
My primary motivation was this: if I get good grades, my life will be better. Now, I should note that I really had very little in the way of a concrete reward. It was kind of the hopeful fantasy that young children are so ready to have. Probably like, "You can have an awesome job like being an astronaut or policeman or being an author if you do all your work!" So that quickly became my goal. I needed to do what I could in school so I could get a good job and live a successful life.
So let's fast-forward a little bit. I make it to middle school, where the pressure of OMG COLLEGE starts to pile up. By now, it's clear that I'm one of those sad students that cares more about getting homework done and getting my scores as high as possible than they do about having a lot of friends or going to parties. So I'm a clear target for my middle school to give me college prep information. And that's where the message I've been hearing gets hammered into me more: "If you go to college, you'll get a great job and make lots of money. Don't worry about the loans; you'll have so much money that they won't even be a problem."
This is more or less what I was like. The rabbit, not the carrot.
Because that's kind of what we've been hearing as students going to college, right? That college means we take out loans, but the investment means we'll pay that back and get a lot more money out of it. But I'm still young and gullible at this point, and it seems to run with my main rule. Trusted people are telling me this information, so I can believe what they are telling me.
The cynical members of my audience are seeing the break in the chain.
So I made it through high school with the knowledge that if I get into a good college, I am practically set. I was in all the Honors and AP classes my little college would let me take, and by the end of high school, I had a 4.33 GPA. I had played football all four years of high school (starting on varsity for three of those years), wrestled for three of them (HDL champ for two of those years), and I was on the track and field team for my senior year. Basically, if I wasn't going to your college, it was money issues. Which I knew would happen, because if I didn't get a full ride, I was going to need loans.
So when it came down to it, I applied and got accepted to three schools: CSU Long Beach, Whittier College, and Willamette University. CSULB was my first choice because most of my friends were going there, and it would be somewhat close to where I lived (Lancaster, CA). Whittier was actually closer, and had been recruiting me for football. Now, there was a lot of talk from my father along the lines of, "I can't tell you where to go, but..." which I kind of knew was coming. I know it made my dad proud that I was getting recruited for a college football program. I got the same offer from Willamette. The weather really drew me to want to go to Oregon, and my friends drew me to Long Beach. However, I took a trip to Whittier College, and I loved the place. It was small, it had beautiful architecture, I loved the aesthetics, and it had the ridiculous mascot of the Poets.
Johnny Poet, or as he's known by WC students, Johnny Rapist.
Oh foolish hope.
And here we get to the point of this whole string of story. After making the Move of Shame back home to San Bernardino, I sit and write this blog from my mom's house. During my senior year of college, I lived off-campus, making monthly rent payments through the jobs I had earned from school. I didn't even have Work-Study during that last year because of a cut in our funding, but I managed to get my job back through the extreme generosity of my supervisors in the college's mail room and from my advisor, Charles Eastman. I didn't play football my senior year because of some decisions to fire my O-line coaches, and if I had played football, I wouldn't have been able to juggle the work, school, and sports to the standards I hold myself to.
For those of you keeping score, I played football for three years of college, worked for three years in a few different departments of the college (and I am thankful for every job I had), and finished my degree with a 3.5 GPA. I worked my ass off.
So here I sit, quite unemployed, tippity-typing away at this blog. I wrote the 30 Days of Video Game blog to keep myself writing, and my cousin and I have started a podcast called 8-bit Banter. Neither of these, though, adds money to my bank account in any way. I have my Bachelor's in English, but I've run into the best Catch-22 of all: You need experience to get a job, but you can't get experience if you've had no job. Apparently the three I had at the college don't count for anything to most employers, including the one where I was responsible enough to cover for my supervisors when they could not make it into work.
I've applied to jobs since May when I graduated. I made it to the final stages of a big opportunity with LA County, but was rejected at the last stage. I had connections to a store which was right by me during the past summer, but they were worried that I was too qualified for them and that I would just skip out when something better came along.
Click for the full-size image; taken from The Trenches.
And I've really heard nothing. I've gotten a few "No thank you"s from some of the nicer companies, or just the no-response treatment from most of the other ones. So far, no job. I was hoping that I could start saving now to help when my college loans start becoming due in, oh, less than three months now, but alas, this may not be the case.
I want to go on record as saying that this is not the college's fault, nor do I want to demonize employers more than they already are. It may be my fault for getting a degree in something that isn't a hard science, which I find really respectable, or something that's kind of a buzzword, like the Business Admin degree. I went and studied what I loved, but it seems like that has been a poor choice on my part so far. It feels like my ability to write, which people have tried to tell me is a great selling point, is nothing without the right connections.
I may just be feeling desperate about my current standing, but it feels like I have been lied to on many fronts. The job market isn't what we predicted it would be. There are more students than me, I am sure, that feel this way. We were promised that if we were diligent, and worked our asses off in school, we would be in a great place to get a great job. A lot of us were promised something. We held up our end of the bargain, and our reward was never delivered. Like I said, I'm having a hard time getting a small, regular job, because employers are afraid I'm going to jump ship at my first opportunity. And I really can't blame them.
So my request is simple: pass this on. Consider this the only thing I've really asked to have re-posted by you, my readers, family, and friends. Not for a popularity-contest sort of thing, but because if anyone feels like crap because they worked their ass off for a piece of paper that hasn't done anything for them, I want them to keep up hope. But importantly, I want to spread the message that things are different than we were told. You can't count on being so intelligent that you'll impress employers into knowing that you're a great addition to their workforce. In fact, you can't really count on anything. We're told to go to college because it's what you're supposed to do. But if you go in just because you've been told to, you might not be prepared for what's coming after that. Send this to anyone who might need this message.
Also, if you repost this enough, I might get noticed by an employer who is impressed with my writing skills and who wants to offer me a job. All job-related e-mails should be sent to freddiemalcomb@gmail.com.
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