For many college students — and especially the class of 2005, which has mere weeks left at UCSD — their imminent entry into the working world is tinged with despair. Questions abound: “Will my skills cut it against my competitors for jobs?” “Will anyone hire me?” “Will I earn a decent salary in my area of interest?”
At UCSD, there is a profound cynicism about the job prospects students will face after college. The tougher a person’s major, the more dismal he or she thinks life will be after college. And those who studied the humanities? Forget it — they’ll be lucky to make $50 a day panhandling in front of Ralphs, or so the belief goes.
Luckily, our doomsday predictions for the working world don’t correspond to today’s reality. Data gathered by the National Association of Colleges and Employers shows that the class of 2004-05 will find “an increase in both the number of companies hiring new graduates and the number of people these companies would be hiring.” They should expect a 4-percent increase in starting salaries, to boot.
If those numbers don’t seem convincing, according to Craig Schmidt, assistant director of the Career Development Program at UCSD, students’ paranoia about the job market is just that — paranoia. Schmidt describes the job market as dipping from 2000 to 2004, but says “things have begun to turn around,” and in his office he’s seen a heartening sign — students coming in seeking advice on how to handle multiple job offers and salary negotiations. UCSD has also seen an increase in the number of employers recruiting students at campus job fairs.
So fear not, UCSD graduates — up to a point. Job-seekers lacking practical experience in their field, interpersonal skills or critical thinking skills will always have problems shining during job interviews and excelling in jobs, no matter how impressive their degrees. Unfortunately, many UCSD students seem to forget this crucial detail, putting their noses to the academic grindstone for four years, mistakenly thinking a stellar GPA is all they need to waltz into their dream job after college. It may be surprising to some that Schmidt cites interpersonal communication skills, ability to work on a team and problem-solving skills as prime qualities employers seek in new hires. It should be less surprising that UCSD students, as a whole, need to grow in terms of the interpersonal skills we bring to the workplace. Luckily, programs like Express to Success explicitly seek to correct this problem, but a relatively tiny percentage of UCSD students use this program. Why? Crushed by classes, we don’t have time — and this focus on academics at the expense of everything else is the root of the problem.
As Schmidt describes it, UCSD is “a highly theoretical and academic institution”; the classes here are compelling and time-consuming, but when college is over and all academic requirements are met, being smart is not enough. It’s a given that anyone with a UCSD degree is smart, and a high GPA can reveal a number of things — that your major didn’t challenge you, that you worked hard, that you enjoyed your area of study, that you mastered the art of cheating, that you found a genius-caliber study buddy. It’s not an indication of a good student or a good employee any more than your blood type is a test of your health; otherwise the job application and interview process could be replaced by the presentation of one’s college transcript.
The great shortcoming of too many UCSD students is that they don’t know what employers want and don’t put much stock in being a well-rounded employee, focusing instead on the academic hamster wheel and graduating with little or no job experience or hands-on practical experience in their area of interest. It’s a self-defeating strategy not helped a bit by professors who teach based on the assumption that their classes are all we should care about.
But professors alone can’t be blamed for all the people who emerge from college with degrees but no marketable skills or job experience. Nor can Career Services be blamed for not getting the word out to students about the importance of internships, student research opportunities and other invaluable opportunities for students to gain the necessary practical skills and on-the-job experience, because they do get the word out. According to Schmidt, 90 percent of UCSD students use Career Services in some capacity before they graduate, even if it’s simply registering on Port Triton.
Perhaps all UCSD students need is a reality check. The power of a UCSD diploma shouldn’t be underestimated — simply being a UCSD graduate sets us apart from job-seekers from lesser universities — but it shouldn’t be overestimated, either, because grades alone don’t, and shouldn’t, give anyone a free ride to the premier ranks of Qualcomm or Microsoft.
To those stressing about finding a decent job out of college, the statistics should be comforting: college graduates typically stay at their first job only one or two years, and people typically switch jobs eight to 10 times and careers three to four times throughout their lives, according to Schmidt. That is, even if you end up hating your job at Enterprise Rent-A-Car (one of the foremost employers of newly minted college grads) or your career as an electrical engineer, you can, and should never hesitate to, switch. Remember the frantic and numerous changes in majors most students make — one week biology, the next music, one month art, the next physics? The real-world jumping between jobs and careers mirror this constant change more than we tend to think.
Year after year, UCSD graduates criticize our weak interpersonal skills, and programs like Express to Success aggressively advertise themselves in an effort to make up for this shortcoming. But does the problem lie with the education UCSD students are receiving, or with the students themselves? A curriculum that tends toward the overly theoretical is sometimes compounded by complacent students who do nothing to make up for it, choosing instead to complain about the content of their classes. Needless to say, this is not the way to make the most out of one’s university education or out of one’s lot in life. Some UCSD graduates even emerge from college with sub-par English language skills. As the cream of the intellectual crop, we UCSD students owe it to ourselves to do better.
At some point, the responsibility must fall on students — for if we have problems finding a job after college, scapegoating our professors or classes is futile. UCSD’s faculty and staff can impart knowledge about their respective fields, but they can’t hold our hands in all respects, and they won’t fill out job applications or help us ace job interviews when the time comes.
In the end, UCSD graduates have no excuse to do anything but shine in the burgeoning job market.