What if your degree is the reason you are unemployed?

Students are graduating with Bachelors, Masters and PhDs with nothing but mental health issues, students debts, low-skill jobs and unemployment waiting for them on the other side. I am one of these happy chirpy students who has graduated in such wonderfully BLOOMING times. During my final year at University, I cracked. Like an egg. It all got to me, the pressure of having to apply for grown-up jobs, whilst having to deal with Uni and the un-achievable and un-standardized grading system. And when I mean it got to me, I don’t mean I was stressed and sad, I mean I had sleeping disorders, I couldn’t eat properly and ended up in counseling. Literally cracked. I have always been a perfectionist, especially when it comes to school work. I eat, breathe and live whatever I am doing, until I hand it in. And then start on the next big thing. This is not to say everything I do is “perfect”, but rather, I have super high standards for my self, and I need to feel like I have given it my all before I actually submit it. I put a little bit of my heart, soul and mind in my work. The whole “ah well, that will do” does not really exist in my world. And the times when that has happened, they have been haunted by days in bed crying and watching Sex and the City and drinking coconut water.

It’s pathetic, really. But that’s how it has been. I love learning, I love writing, and I love proving myself. And for most of my life my teachers have been thrilled and excited to mark my stuff. Until University. I became a number in the system. My opinions didn’t matter, you build your arguments based on the opinions of others, who, funnily enough, also build their arguments based on either agreeing or refuting others. However, when YOU voice your opinion a little bit too much in a formal essay (even though you mask it up with phrases like “one could assume that.” or “it could be conceived that..”) it can go three ways:

1) The marker loves your opinion and gives you a gold shiny star and you get an A1, possibly earning you a first class degree and a fabulous self esteem.

2) The marker hates what you have to say. How DARE you think anything that mocks these 500 year-old critics?!

3) The marker completely does not understand your point and you look like an ass.

The pattern here is that power is taken away from the writer and is given to the individual marker. So you are writing for a purpose, to please someone, rather than for the sake of learning and developing and challenging your thoughts. I have had all three happen to me, but more often than not it’s nr 2 and 3. Mostly number three. The amount of times I have had things underlined with someone writing “No.” Eeh No according to who? This is Literature and/ or Film and TV, my opinion is just as valid as anyone else's. Supposedly. And when your essays include tiny fractions of your soul, as mine did, and you are consistently told you are not quite good enough, or you need to constantly improve, it really affects your entire being. Self- doubt is the worst. To be on the safe side, either you just stop doing anything that is remotely ‘outside the box’ or you (like I did throughout my last year) begin annoying all your lecturers before every and any assignment and go through all your ideas and thoughts to make sure they are coherent, acceptable. Kinda like asking your mommy for permission.

The funny thing is, even after “asking for permission” to write and think certain things, the grade you get it feels completely random anyway. It just doesn’t make sense. Collecting your essay feels a bit like the lottery. I know I am not the only student who felt like this. It all depends on who is marking it, what time they are marking it, what their mood is, and how they feel. Sometimes an essay you write when you’re high on coffee and have no idea what you are writing about gets a better mark than the essay that you thought you nailed. And one persons criticism becomes the other ones praise. I was praised by some markers for having strong opinions, whilst other thought they were TOO strong. Some felt like I shouldn’t rely too much on secondary sources whilst others thought I needed more. MAKE UP YOUR MIND. Then they tell you to go through your past essays and learn from your mistakes. Eeeeh. Can’t really learn if theres no real pattern? And the most frustrating thing is being marked down for excluding information. How the fuck do you expect me to fit in the entire history of English Literature in a 3000- word essay? It’s not that I don’t know the point you want me to make, or that I am too stupid to understand it, I have just not mentioned it because I don’t have enough words, asshole, I have left it out by choice. Maybe I just dont WANT to give you a definition of what Knighthood implies, because I know that you know. And I know too. You know?

Not entirely what I thought University would do to me. I was expecting to find my voice, and discover my opinions and thoughts. I was expecting to be inspired, to broaden my mind and my senses. I was expecting my opinions and voice to thrive, to become stronger. Instead, most times I felt they were stifled. The educational system stifles imagination. (shoutout to Anna!) It teaches us to do things in a certain way, to achieve a result, because we are told that the result is the reason we are there in the first place. Emphasis is placed on the final product and not the act of learning and developing.

The point is I finished University with a little bit of an anti-climax. So that was it? That was all? I was thinking it would be the most formative experience of my life. And in a way maybe it was. But more because of the anger it has left me in and the wonderful people I have met, the societies I have joined. Definitely not Academia. Studying taught me how to study, sure. How to analyse, how to think critically. But most of all it taught me that the system is a joke. You don’t actually learn anything you need to know, you are just given the tools. The world doesn’t look the way it did 200 years ago. The system is outdated now and the time has come for an educational reform and revolution.

So. 8 months after graduating Student Services call me to ask about my experiences at Glasgow Uni and so on and so forth. “How well did University prepare you for employment?” they ask. “Not. At. All” I answer. And I know many of my fellow students answered the same.

Funny huh?

We are told to work hard at School, to get into a good University, to get a good degree, to get a good job. Yet there is a massive degree inflation right now. More people than ever are graduating with degrees in a time with job shortage. So graduates end up taking so called low-skill jobs in shops and call-centers, leaving people who could, and should be doing those jobs, unemployed. People with Masters degrees are taking the jobs that people with Bachelors degrees should do. And people with PhDs are taking jobs that Masters- graduates should do. WHAT IS GOIN ON.

On top of all the crap there is an evil, evil, evil intern-culture. The epitome of evil. Companies and organisations KNOW they can get graduates to work there for 6 months for free, because people are desperate for experience and knowledge of the workforce. Graduates that should be getting paid are working overtime and for free, because they have to. Cause that’s the current system. And it is evil. I may as well have skipped university and answered phone-calls for four years and learnt a bit about the working world. I am absolutely not hating on all internships. I know there are some really amazing ones, which operate like an internship should. They give you experience and skills in return for your time and at the end of it you possibly land a job. And you live Happily. Ever. Fucking. After. The evil internships I’m taking about are the one’s that are a bit off-the record. The one where you are not really taught anything. You’re just given the dirty work.

So. I apply and I apply and I apply, and a person can only take so much rejection. I’ve re-written my CV over 50 times, and I love my current version. I tailor it to the job, my cover letter too. I call people up, I go and surprise visit employers. And nothing. It doesn’t make sense. You feel helpless when you know you have the knowledge, the experience and the drive to be doing that dream job, and yet your are not given the chance. You are, once again, derived into being just a number in a system. And that is when it hit me. Maybe it is my degree that is putting them off? They know I come with baggage. I am going to get bored quickly if I am not challenged enough and I have student loans and a Master of Arts and they have to pay me money.

When I apply for jobs I am clearly over-qualified for, they know I’m not going to stick around forever. When I apply for jobs I think I could do, they see a whole bunch of years spent learning and too few years of actually doing. And in both cases, I am more expensive to hire than someone who does not have a University degree. So there it is, my question: What if my degree is doing the absolute opposite of what it should? It is making me doubt my self and my skills, and it is leaving me unemployed and maybe even unattractive on the job market?

Just a thought.

#degree #unemployment #educationalrevolution #graduation #poop