THE GRADUATE:In the first of a short series, graduate JONATHAN WYSEsays goodbye to eating cold beans with a pen, and hello to a 60-hour working week
FINAL YEAR results came out last week, but without much pomp or ceremony. These days, the department sends an e-mail to students containing their individual results as well as the grade for their degree overall.
There were few surprises. Parsimonious lecturers were cursed, generous markers forgiven for all previous misdeeds. My friends and I felt a mixture of relief and thirst, so we wandered towards a nearby public house for a celebratory drink.
There were some regrets. The preceding year was mostly spent promising to turn over a “new leaf” study-wise, only to find that the new leaf bore a striking resemblance to the old leaf. Indeed, the typical student’s new library regime usually failed to make it past the stage of colour-coding a study timetable, or buying highlighters with the aforementioned intention.
This suddenly changed when panic set in. Conventional pastimes were shelved until June, so that different pastimes could be acquired which would be more appropriate for practising in the library instead of studying (example: playing Scrabble online).
The predominant topic of conversation gradually became complaining about the paltry opening hours in the library, until eventually you had few opinions about anything except what far-flung eatery you could justifiably travel to for dinner to maximise time spent not studying while remaining guilt-free. It was a miserable, pathetic existence.
Of course, efforts had – and still have – to be made to obtain employment for the forthcoming year. Graduate recruitment fairs were attended, where you feigned interest in becoming a Lidl store manager in order to receive further information and a free chocolate bar.
Days were spent filling out exhaustive online application forms – even though a combination of procrastination and ignorance meant that many of the application deadlines had passed. But such realisations constituted only an occasional respite from the monotony.
Lecturers, who typically and understandably don’t know most students on a personal basis, were asked for references of a personal nature. They struggled to recognise you from the weekly Monday morning class, while you insisted that it was possible for them to recognise you from the weekly Monday morning class.
Meanwhile, the cover letter was strategically altered to suit the position you were applying for, as you realised that the focus of your degree could (practically, if not ethically) be made to sound like any of several tenuously-related topics. Your “talents” and “interests” suddenly became extremely fluid concepts – liable to change depending on who was asking, what you thought they wanted to hear and what key words or phrases they had on the front page of their website.
Pretty soon, you realised that the cover letter could make or break your application to a frightening degree. I am still personally reeling from a mistake made last year when applying for a summer internship to think-tanks in the US, proudly proclaiming in one batch of e-mails that “I am seek internship”. I received few responses despite my numerous talents.
Even after receiving a promising reply to one of my less poorly-phrased letters, I told another potential employer that I would be very interested in working with their similarly-named competitor. They subsequently advised me that the position was filled, and I don’t blame them.
But although many of my friends are still in that same boat, I was fortunate enough to receive an offer during the year from a firm in the IFSC and will begin work there in July. This knowledge resulted in much-reduced stress levels for me, but has led to crises of a different sort: the realisation that people in the real world work 60 hours a week, the realisation that people in the real world get around 20 days’ holidays a year, and a sudden understanding of what the phrase “living for the weekend” really means.
The certainty that I was leaving college may even have made me more nostalgic than my friends who were still flirting with ideas of further study. Is this the last time that I’ll eat a “meal” in the Buttery consisting primarily of onions and sauce? Is this the last time that I’ll eat cold beans out of the tin with a pen? The last one is something which I never did, but always aspired to have memories of as a student.
The promise of future employment has also motivated me to cram as much travelling as possible into my last college summer, while also making it financially feasible to do so. Along with an old school chum, I am now heading to Malaysia for my final student travel experience.
This particular destination has quite distressed my mother, who soon discovered the most draconian law on the books in Malaysia and identified it as a severe threat to my wellbeing. Since the death penalty is issued for drug-trafficking in Malaysia, she advised me to be particularly careful not to carry anything for another person.
I told her that I would make a special exception this time and try to avoid doing so, since the regular jail-time handed out in most countries doesn’t normally deter me from such reckless and irresponsible behaviour. My mother is deeply unimpressed.