Today I had a pseudo interview.... It made me so angry, I just had to write something:
He looks me in the eye, a frown forming from those caterpillar brows, and asks “Why do you want this job? You have a lot of qualifications. You’ve a degree and have done an internship. Why would you want to work in a café?”.
So this is it. I don’t know what I want to do. I have many interests: writing, art and design, environmental issues, marine conservation, food. But how to channel them? I know, I know, it’s a long-road. But seriously, a coffee-bitch? As it turns out, money does not in fact grow on trees. A job’s a job.
Like every other confused graduate, I’ve done THE internship - unpaid of course, for an environmental NGO. Sitting behind a desk, being the photocopying and coffee monkey, otherwise fused to a chair, my only mobility being the occasional 360° spin to the bin (whoopee!). So my ‘media and communications’ internship basically consisted of sending emails to anyone and everyone, and when you’ve finished sending those emails, researching more people to send emails to. And what do I take away from it? That I don’t want to be a campaigner for an NGO and, even if I wanted to be, I don’t have enough experience anyway. Great.
So what next? I’ve done the soul-destroying call centre job (I did get to speak to a Mrs. A Hole. Nice.) Applied for jobs in media, environmental sector and within the arts, some of them were even paid. But of course, my degree isn’t in the relevant area, and I don’t have enough ‘experience’. And it just makes me wonder - how did these people get to where they are? Am I meant to intern for three years for free? For someone like myself, who doesn’t even know what they want to do, this seems a little absurd.
At this stage, it really is no wonder that the more well-off of the confused flee on gap years, become ski-instructors, delay the process by undertaking a masters or take a TEFL course. I don’t even like kids - they moan and ask too many questions- but even I have applied to be an English language assistant, it is apparently a step up on the CV ladder and it seems to be one of the very few graduate-sympathetic fields out there.
So, whilst all this pondering and complaining may help me decide what I don’t want to do, there is still the unanswered question of what I do want to do.
The world of employment has been far from sympathetic towards my quest - “at least four years experience required”, “must speak fluent Spanish”, “paid experience necessary” “need Master’s level qualification or above”. And most of these requirements are necessary even for unpaid work. The recent graduate, as are many young people, is recurrently met by the hopeless paradox of needing experience to get work and yet needing work to gain experience. It’s the chicken-and-egg of unemployment.
It has become clear that paradoxes such as this feed the ideology of a ‘career path’. One is encouraged to get a certain set of skills specific to a certain job to reach a certain goal, making you perfectly carved to fit ‘the ideal job.’ But for people such as myself, the prospect of knowing exactly where you’ll be in 40 years’ time is definitely more terrifying than not. Excited and terrified as to what the world has to offer me, I know that my route will reveal itself, but amongst the distractions of paying the rent and bills, I need to keep reminding myself to keep an eye out for it.
