Note: I'm going to try to keep things light for the rest of the summer, cause lord knows we need some laughs. For next week, read The Devil, The Lovers and Me by Kimberlee Auerbach and, for the week after, read Death by Chick Lit by Lynn Harris. This week I'm looking at something with significance told in a palpable, funny way.
So many of us Generation Y superstars—especially the hyper ambitious female variety—leave the hallowed halls of higher learning with great expectations. We have been told—thanks to self-esteem education and hippie parents who adored our every bad poem—that we are as unique and special as beautiful snowflakes. And we believed them.
The workplace melts that delusion very quickly. We learn that we are in competition with thousands of other recent grads who also have student loans and few marketable skills (no, regurgitating Foucault does not count as a skill). Neither will we scale the corporate ladder like Spiderwoman. Instead, we will have to crawl up one copying/collating, coffee fetching rung at a time, just like everyone else. The humiliation of ordinariness bites after all those “you can be anything,� feminist pep talks.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that a young writer with one of those overpriced degrees (from Brown) and plenty of adverse experience has arrived to explain how to make the real world bite sting a bit less. Hannah Seligson’s book, New Girl on the Job: Advice from the Trenches, speaks directly to this disappointed generation of highly ambitious and more than slightly unrealistic women. She deals with all the doozies: Devil Wears Prada bosses, sexual harassment, annual reviews, and salary negotiations.
Seligson, 25, was—gasp—fired from her first job and she’s not afraid to admit it. Through her conversational tone, she takes the shame out of career experimentation and the occasional wrong turn.
After all, we are destined to change jobs an average of ten times, an unprecedentedly high number in comparison to the career paths our parents and grandparents faced (or didn’t face in the case of our grandmothers, but that’s a whole different can of worms.)
Seligson relays just how much she understands the Gen Y predicament when it comes to the workplace, but she also doesn’t sell us out. She also believes in the contemporary conviction that it is important to actually like your job. She writes: “If you don’t find a job that in some capacity makes you tick you will be miserable, or at the very least, less productive at work. Think of it this way—you’ll work for ten thousand days of your life, and that’s too many days to not enjoy what you do.�
The New Girl on the Job uncovers the new American Dream. It’s not the perfect house, the white picket fence, and the 2.5 kids, it is fulfilling work and respect. We don’t just want to make a good living and put food on the table anymore, we want to be professional creatives, entrepreneurs, inventors, visionaries, and influentials. Sure it is a tall order. Sure we’re a little entitled. But isn’t this what you raised us to believe was possible?
Seligson sees the intergenerational rifts and addresses them very matter-of-factly: “You shouldn’t fear that the arrival of a New Girl will undermine your position, or write off the older women you work with as out of touch. There is room for all of us.�
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Actually I have this book recommendation for you all:
FFF
I am such a creep!
You know, tangentially, the problem for me when I began my first job out of college was not that I believed I was a special snowflake or any of that--it was that I hate office work. And it doesn't matter what the office work is for. I just hate it. But the school I went to and the class to which I belonged prepared me for nothing else. My college's career services had binders and binders of job listings classified by type of industry, but if you walked in and wanted to look for jobs that did not involve working in an office, there was nowhere for you to go.
Eventually I figured out what I wanted to do, so I guess there was no harm done, unless you count the year of misery I endured before I figured it out.
Books like these are always useful, but I will say that it seems to me, based on my experiences and those of my peers, that the "disillusionment" is something all of us (especially those of us who have reached adulthood over the past 20 years or so) run into.
EG, what was it that you figured out you wanted to do? Are you a teacher?
I've recently gone back to full time work at my office (health research and education) after finally getting my undergrad degree, and I'm so fucking bored I could cry. I can feel my ass expanding sitting here all day; my metabolism was not made for this! I've got headaches/eye strain from staring at the computer all day and not moving, and I'm surrounded by grey.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out if I can hold out at this place if/when I go to grad school (next year!), or if I should look for a more feminist/hands on job now. Decisions, decisions.
I got a PhD in English, and am now a professor! Hurray for me! (No, I'm dead serious, I just finished a couple months ago, and I still feel like throwing myself a parade every damn day.)
I hated working in an office. I felt like I could quite literally feel my brain cells dying. Now I can set my own hours and my work is based around my interests and intellectual stimulation, and around helping students gain more complex understandings as well. I love it. Getting a PhD isn't for everyone--you have to be willing and able to give up significant earning potential for several years, for one thing--but it was definitely right for me.
I also looked into becoming a midwife, but that wasn't for me. There are better books out now than there were when I finished college, books about what you can do with your liberal arts degree, but I haven't sat down with any of them seriously.
EG, what you said sounds a lot like the path I'm considering setting for myself.
I graduated from college last May, and I've been working in a property management office as a file clerk since last August (in fact, I'm at work right now). And as I sit here putting of the next leg of today's filing, I swear I can feel my brain cells falling one by one out each ear.
How long did you wait before starting your PhD? For financial reasons, I won't be able to go back to graduate school for another two years or so, by which time I fear that every professor I ever had will forget about me, and I'll have no one to call up and ask for recommendation letters.
I'm sorry for derailing the thread. I just saw what you wrote and nearly died at the thought that there might actually be hope for me.
There is always hope! I waited a year--I think that if I had chosen a different path, I might have waited longer. If I had fully explored freelance writing, for instance...but then again, I couldn't, because I would have lost my health insurance.
One thing you can do is to ask your professors to write your recs now and to keep them on file. That way, they can write them with the memory of your brilliance fresh in their minds, but you can take the time you need before going back.
I'm always happy to answer questions about going into academia. I love it! But do know that the job market is hard--I was very lucky in finding the job I did, which is my dream job, and not everyone is so lucky. But I loved graduate school, I really did.
But do know that the job market is hard--I was very lucky in finding the job I did, which is my dream job, and not everyone is so lucky. But I loved graduate school, I really did.
Two creative writing professorships opened up at CSULB not long before I left. My creative writing prof at the time told me the department had received 200 applications for the position. I'm thinking of going the literature route instead, but I'm not sure those odds would be much better.
Thanks for answering my questions. :o)
The humiliation of ordinariness bites after all those “you can be anything,� feminist pep talks
And can I just say that that is the truest statement I've heard in a long time?
Anyway, back to filing.
You go, EG! Congratulations on obtaining your PhD, getting a position you love, and following the path you wanted to.
And that's a really good idea to get recommendation letters now from Professors if one is going to put off grad school for a while. Even if they have to revise it/tailor it in future when one does go, at least you can send it back to them for revision. I might do that!
Can I chime in and say how comforting it is to commiserate about this?
I've been out of school for *cough* six years now and in that time have been sufficiently beaten down by the non-profit and publishing industries. (Also fired from my first job! Woo-hoo!) I keep hemming and hawing about whether or not to accrue more debt to pursue grad school to study something I love but doesn't seem viable, employment-wise, or to just sell out totally and get some corporate gig (because if I'm bored by what I do anyway, why not make more money while I do it?).
In the meantime, I feel like: a) time is running out, and b) I'm clearly not as smart as my parents and professors thought I was so many moons ago. "The humiliation of ordinariness" indeed. Argh.
EG: Congratulations on your Ph.D. and your job!
Andrea: Going into graduate school for a Ph.D. is a major commitment, so don't worry about it taking you a couple of years to get there. That's valuable time you can spend weighing the pros and cons.
Given my experience in graduate school over the last several years (I hope to finish sometime next spring), I would say that the most important lesson - or at least one of the most important lessons - is that a Ph.D. is, fundamentally, an education, and not just job training to be a professor.
Mind you, that's where most Ph.D.s, especially in the humanities, go. That's all well and good, but you may find as I did that academia isn't for you, if for no other reason than the tough job market. Academics often see pursuing a non-academic job after a Ph.D. as "settling" for something lesser, and transmit this notion to their students. Make you own path, and don't be discouraged from investigating all of the possibilities your degree can open up for you.
This is a little off topic but for the first time in my life as a parent I feel a little bit better about being a little bit critical of my kids once in a while. I tried to be constructive (although I'm not convinced I was that good at it) but they always seemed so wounded. Perhaps I did them a service, after all. My oldest is forging a career right now, propelled at least in part by a mind numbing post-undergrad job. Perhaps this book would be good for her.
Linnaeus,
I definitely understand the emphasis of a PhD being more abour immersing oneself in their chosen feild as opposed to training for a professorship or other job position. I think that's part of the reason it's so appealing to me. I had a lot of fun in the classroom when I was in college. The main thing that holds me back, to be honest, is the commitment you mention. I don't want to throw myself and a lot of money into a program just to find out that academia isn't for me and/or that I can't find a job.
I just know that what I'm doing now is completely departed from anything I've ever been interested in. I'm tempted to go back to school aiming for a master's just so see what opens up (but there's the money thing again). I'd like to try my hand in the publishing industry, but I'm on completely the wrong coast.
Dorothy: I hear you on the last point of your post regarding feeling like you aren't as smart as parents and teachers thought you were. Somtimes I wonder what happened to the little girl who was going to graduate with honors from Stanford University and become the first woman president.
On an interesting side note, I remember getting so much encouragement and petting as a child that for the longest time I swore up and down that i had straight O's in elementary school. Not too long ago, I dug up my old report cards and was shocked to find that a) my grades, while decent (the equivilant of a B average) were certainly not oustanding ivy league material, and b) that my strong subjects at the time were math and science, which is completely opposite of what I wound up feeling like my strengths were, which was reflected in my grades in high school and college.
Hey, thanks everyone for the kind words!
Dorothy, I don't know what kind of graduate degree you were thinking of, but a good PhD program will offer you a fellowship covering your tuition and providing you with a small stipend if they want you to attend. Masters' programs are different, though.
Thanks, Andrea and EG!
Unfortunately, it is a Master's program that I'm considering---in mass media/communications. I'd like to eventually do media literacy work, but no one can give me a straight answer about how to do that without being a teacher or a professor (which are both amazing professions that I'm not suited for). The research continues.
It's nice to see someone writing career stuff for twentysomethings who has actually been there and who acknowledges that yes, it sucks, but no, we're not wrong to want a job that treats us with basic human dignity.
Another disappointed recent grad here.
I honestly can't help but feel very angry. I feel that my peers and I were lied to. We cannot be anything we want to be if we just follow our dreams. For me, this has contributed to a huge crash in my long-standing issues with depression. I don't need (author) Seligson to tell me that uninspiring jobs will make me miserable. Before I go out and find this book, it would be nice to know whether she actually has practical advice regarding obtaining a job that won't put me in a psych ward, and not just the usual "stick it out and look harder."
Thanks for the book recommendation--definitely going to seek it out.
I'm another recent grad (like two months recent). I haven't gotten disillusioned QUITE yet--I'm searching for a garden-variety administrative assistant position in my university while I give myself a few years to study music seriously and see where that goes. I'm also going to be applying to a Ph.D. program at my undergrad university this fall, since it's the best place for my academic specialty and would allow me to stay with my music teacher. It sounds nice to me in the abstract, but I'm wondering if the office drudgery this year won't make me want to kill myself after a few weeks.
Congrats on the degree, EG! And for the other folks considering applying: I've heard that, even though the academic job market has been horrid for the past decade or so, by the time the people who are entering now finish their degrees, at least the Baby Boomers will have started to retire and/or die. Not to put too fine a point on it. (And not that that solves the problem of casualization/the spread of adjuncting.) Also, I just read a book called "So What Are You Going to Do With That?" by Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius that discusses how Ph.D.s can successfully market themselves to careers outside academia. I know, I'm thinking way too far ahead, but maybe some of you would find it useful. It's comforting to imagine that there are other routes to go if the academic job market continues to suck!