Welcome back, students! And a big, feel-good hug to all my fellow seniors out there who spent their winter break applying to graduate school, studying for the GRE, or (the worst), desperately searching for a full-time job.
If you are anything like me, you spent your break perusing job boards and emailing past internship advisors in the hopes that something . anything . would be open. And if you are a journalism major like me, you know damn well nothing is open. The highly coveted paid internships at the big-boy papers have hundreds of applications for, like, one open slot and no one is going to hire you as a staff reporter because of budget and staff cuts. Awesome. Someone should have told me that freshman year. Sure, everyone wants an unpaid intern, but I can’t exactly afford to gallivant around New York or Los Angeles for a summer because I don’t even have money for the first month’s rent.
Commence mid-life crisis at age 21.
So what do you do? I don’t know. Go to grad school? Some of us can’t afford to go to grad school after racking up four years of UM tuition. If the answer was that easy there would be no need to write this and I’d be sitting back, reliving my high school senioritis days when my “Early Action” application to UM had already returned with a big fat “yes.” But unfortunately, I need a job. We all need jobs. Or maybe we don’t.
Sure, there are plenty of alternative options after graduation, but some of us – myself included – can’t afford to travel off to India for six months to teach English to young schoolchildren. I also need health insurance. When I told my mom I wanted to work on a cruise ship because I liked traveling, she laughed. I’m not sure if that meant I was brilliant, or just stupid.
I remember back in 2005 when I was a work-study in the Hurricane business office and I used to always see an ad for egg donation. If I was tall, skinny and a genius, I could’ve made $10,000 right there. But unfortunately, I’m short, kind of moody (okay, always moody) and I have a big butt. Not exactly the kind of traits anyone would want to deliberately give their kids.
It just seems to me that I need to make money, so I need to have a job. To get a job, I need to have one of those really prestigious internships. To get one of those, I need lots of money to pay for my pricey apartment, transportation, food, new work clothes, etc.
So what is my ultimate conclusion? Go home and live with my parents. I’m sure they’d be more than happy to have us return after spending four years so far away. They’ll buy us food, make us dinner, do our laundry and take us shopping (at least that’s what my parents do when I come home). Then at least we can job search with a roof over our heads and food in our bellies.