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Reality
The American dream says if you work hard, go to college and make good grades, you can have a six figure income, a large home and a nice car. The reality is you work hard, go to college, graduate with honors and end up working a dead end job where your diligence isn’t noticed or is noticed by someone with little pull.
Unless you know someone in an authoritative position, you are just another number; another number with wasted potential.
The problem is too many qualified people in a market that is too tight to accept them. This opens the door for companies to hire young, eager graduates at low wages. A student in today’s world graduates with a $40,000 education and more than $5,000 credit card debt. Add that to car payments, insurance payments, rent payments, cell phone bills, power bills, utility bills, cable bills, grocery bills, and student loans, and you have a recipe for disaster. With the cost of living increasing, graduates are forced to take low wage jobs just to make ends meet.
This ventures the question, “Why did I waste four years and $40,000 on an education when I’m working for and with under educated, over paid people?” “When will my chance come?”
The old adage is true, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
Unfortunately students are leaving the safety of cushioned university walls to venture their luck in the harsh reality of the “real world.”
When a graduate enters the workforce, the promises of higher education fade away. Getting an interview is harder than it’s ever been. Your resume is printed in quality cotton-pressed high dollar paper. Your degree at top and your accomplishment list to the bottom. You send them four a day at a rate of $0.67 plus the cost of paper and manila envelopes. You wait. You follow up with phone calls on your only phone, a cell phone. You are put off daily until you realize on paper you look just like everyone else.
What companies want is experience. Without that, you are the next door-to-door salesman (or as the business world lies to lure fresh meat, direct marketers).
After wasting posting and ink charges, you are in the same position you were months prior; unemployed and broke. So you take a temp job. You work 8-5 pushing paper. You are paid $10-12 an hour without benefits. And maybe, after 6 months of brain numbing monkey work, you are brought on full time earning $25,000 a year.
You do the math and discover your salary is just enough to cover your bills. Mom and dad have preached to you since childhood, save your money. You are left with the question, “What money? It’s all spent on bills.”
But, you stay positive. “At least I have a job,” you tell yourself. You wake up everyday wishing your job weren’t so bad. You battle gridlocked traffic in your slacks and polo. You waste $25-75 a week on gas, just to get to and from work. You listen to the yakking of local yokels on the radio just to pass the time. You get to the office, fill your Styrofoam cup with Maxwell House and discuss last night’s ‘American Idol.’ You sit in your cubical, check your messages and email and wait for the work to begin. Then you think, “Is this what my education has bought me? Is this the dream my parents had when they packed their cars with my stuff and drove me to the university?”
You suck it up and look around; this isn’t the sugar coated paradise my career counselors promised me. This is reality. But, remind yourself, if you work hard, you too can have the stuff that dreams are made of. Your day is coming and that house is right down daydreamer’s corner. And that’s your BMW parked in the garage, right behind the lure of the American dream.
Snap out of it, you’ve got a report to highlight.
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Posted by Towelboy on 2008-01-08 21:24:46 | Rating: | Views: 63
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sad, but true, what is to become of these young grads with hopefulness of landing it big? NOt to mention that alot of grads from overseas get offered jobs over here for less pay. I heard that nurses from India get shipped over here becuz of the shortages of them. I am sure they get paid less.
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Posted by freeme
on 2008-01-08 21:51:25
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How true! You spoke my mind and thats exactly how I feel right now.
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Posted by Youthful1
on 2008-01-09 10:01:42
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