Help for graduates: your dreams are stupid, become a teacher
You insist that the job in Sainsbury’s is just a stopgap.
Whoever it was who said that uni was the best three years of life clearly wasn’t a Warwick grad. At least Wozza was a protective shield between you and the big, scary outside world. Albeit, a protective shield that pumps the receptacles of all who pass through with KPMG and Deloitte paraphernalia – all to the tune of around £12,500 per year.
Now it’s time to face the music. Now it’s time to cut the shit and concede that you’re fast switching from ‘recent graduate’ to ‘unemployed’.
But withhold you vicious fear a moment: we have done you the great and unenviable service of compiling nine tips to help you land your dream job. (Even though you’re completely talentless!)
1. Relax your Facebook settings.
Let your future employers see a picture of you inebriated and in a foetal position on a bathroom mat. They don’t want an uptight nerd, they want someone they can hang with.
2. Don’t check your emails.
Like the paradigm Schrödinger set up, you’ll get to enjoy two possibilities if you don’t open your emails from any potential employer. You’ll have simultaneously not got the job, and failed to come to terms with reality.
3. Fictionalise the roles and responsibilities you were given during your internship, work experience and/or retail job.
You’re not a liar. You’re a storyteller.
4. Decide between being a task-orientated, self-serving, city-bound narcissist who only looks after numero uno, or being miserable and unemployed.
Ha! Not really. You’ll be unhappy either way, as everyone in your life becomes reclassified as a ‘contact’. Depersonalise all your relationships to the point where they are only worth maintaining if there’s a job in it for you!
5. Let the corporate conveyor belt whisk you and your conformity from university to the office.
All those years of being disciplined into an efficient worker — watching your creativity wrung from you — will finally pay off. That is, unless the master you serve can monetize your personality. Looking at you… service industry.
6. Invest hard in neoliberal rhetoric.
No one really knows what neoliberalism is, but it’s taught us that poverty is a personal and moral failing. It’s true that the only thing stopping you from succeeding in the nepotistic, gender-biased, racist job market is you! Think Positive. Be Positive.
7. When a family friend asks about your future plans don’t say ‘I’ve given up on my dreams.’
Be a realist and say you are just recentring them. It means the same thing but allows you to save face.
8. Don’t listen to that cool professor.
The one who tried to reassure you on results day with “no one really knows what they’re doing.” He’s a tenured snake and you are already losing ground. Quickly, do something! Whilst you still have the currency of youth, and your parents’ money.
9. Do an emergency masters degree.
Graduate job application forms are littered with the corpses of those not quite ready to join the ‘real world’. Go back to higher education: a temporary fix for deeper problems.
Illustrations by the author; Main image via l’Université de Warwick.