Is everyone employed but me?
“I am excited to announce that I will be starting my career at *Insert Prestigious Firm* in the New York Office. I am thrilled for this opportunity and looking forward to joining the team. Thank you to everyone who has helped me through this recruiting process, I couldn’t be more grateful for your guidance!”
I don’t know about you, but this message has been splattered all over my LinkedIn homepage, and it is quite frankly overwhelming. It’s only the beginning of November and it seems like everyone I talk to has been hired from a return offer from their summer internship, is in the final rounds of interviews or is taking some sort of test with a weird combination of letters like the MCATGRELSAT.
But, not all jobs are sending out return offers or hiring right now, at least not if you are not trying to be an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. Do not get me wrong, I am so proud of my friends and every other senior who has a job right now, and I think that they should scream it off the rooftops, because they worked damn hard for that job.
But, there should not be a stigma around not having a job as a college senior because I and everyone else who do not have job offers are still working hard and grinding every day. Finding a job is hard and in itself a full-time job.
Personally, I want to enjoy my senior year at least a little bit without being stressed the whole time about applying to jobs and interviewing. I am still applying, but I have decided to take the stress out of this process.
And yes, I do see that I have the privilege not to stress, because my parents are super supportive. I have a place to go after graduation, which is a luxury that not everyone has. However, getting a job offer before graduation is also not a luxury that everyone has.
This realization that I should not be basing my total self-worth around a job offer by the time I graduate is something that took a while to come to terms with. Here are three things that helped me go from thinking that I am a complete and total failure to realizing that a job does not have to happen right away.
1. I will eventually have a job, even if it doesn’t happen right after I graduate. President Greene and Lisa Noble take too much pride in their employment statistics for me to end up jobless forever. And, I say this as a good thing. They should take pride in this, and we should all use this to our advantage.
2. Everyone has a different timeline for their lives, and they should not be compared to others. There are more than 500 people in the senior class, and we have all taken a different amount of time to graduate high school, find our majors (I had to go through three untill I found mine), understand how to thrive as a student, and figure out how to utilize DavisConnects. Despite this, we have eventually arrived at our last year on the Hill together, and, likewise, we will all eventually get jobs.
3. We are all still kids trying to figure life out and, in reality, not a single one of us has it figured out. I do not think that we should rush to figure it out but instead enjoy the unknown. By the time we do have it figured out we are going to be older than we ever dreamed of being, and I know I want to enjoy my youth for as long as I can.
These three “Maryrita Made Truths” are hopefully helpful in easing the minds of those seniors who feel like they are the only ones without jobs. You are not the only one, and if you cannot find another jobless friend, know that I still don’t have a job and am more than happy to step into the role. We are all at Colby for a reason. We are absurdly smart and capable kids! But in the end, we are all just kids. We won’t be kids forever, so enjoy it while it lasts and don’t waste precious time worrying about being an adult.
Remember this: the college experience is unique. Unlike most things in life, you can never repeat it, nor can you ever again find a place where something extraordinary, something interesting can happen any minute, any day, any month.
No matter what you do after graduation, no matter what job you have, no matter how much money you make, nothing rivals going to class, going to parties, and walking around campus without a care in the world at a pace you will never again experience in life. So do not be so quick to leave. Stop and take in the view from the top of the Hill.
The way I see it, college makes everything seem possible. It incubates our dreams, our goals, and our ambitions. It allows us to organize our lives and construct a framework that makes us better understand ourselves.
I, for one, do not want to sprint through college. I want to make it a marathon. I want to get to the finish line and feel nothing but happiness that these past four years happened. Living in the last of these four years as I write, I am saddened by the fact that the happiness and satisfaction I feel can never be replicated. We must not dwell on that, but rather on the fact that we are all able to share Colby.
~ Maryrita Curcio `22
