Listen up, people, especially you freshmen, and most especially
you little overachieving fresh meat straight out of high school. I
want to share a little chunk of wisdom my brain decided to drop on
me belatedly.
College is a game. Well, it’s part of the game. It can be
a luxuriously furnished and pocketbook-breaking day-care center for
the undecided, or it can be the launching pad for your success. It
just depends on how you play it.
I highly suggest the launching pad option, but it’s not
that simple.
The launching pad image is, of course, the one we’re all
familiar with. It’s part of that formula for success every
parent and politician swears by as though it’s the Bible of
capitalism.
Go to college, ace the classes, graduate cum laude, get a
lucrative job, get the house with the white picket fence with the
freshly baked Norman Rockwell American dream pie cooling off on the
windowsill for those picture-perfect 2.5 kids.
College is that mythical magic factory of success. But as most
of us know, and many will soon figure out, that’s not how it
works.
A bachelor’s degree is about as rare nowadays as a
millionaire (or the game shows manufacturing them). Not that I
completely agree with the assessment, but I once saw the message
“UCLA diploma” scribed on the inside of a toilet stall
with an arrow underneath pointing to the roll of toilet paper.
Obviously this was a message for the undergrads, pardon the pun,
but I never quite saw toilet paper the same way after that. There
is truth, though, to the idea that in the current job market, an
undergrad diploma carries little more worth than mulch.
But it doesn’t have to. That’s the part I just
figured out, in my classically belated way, on the eve of
graduation.
Of course, I realize that the overwhelming majority of you
reading this will not be struck with soup-puking psycho-panic
convulsions and rectal hemorrhages by what will follow. According
to a survey by Vaultreport.com ““ “the Internet’s
ultimate destination for insider company information, advice and
career management services” ““ 80 percent of all
graduating seniors will have completed at least one internship by
the time they’ve shuttled their mortarboards (that square
thing on top of your head at graduation, dude) skyward. So
I’m writing this for the 20 percenters, who need a catcher in
the rye.
Here’s how the game works. In its crudest form, college is
a filtration system. The smart ones understand this and will hate
me (sorry, guys) for revealing the dirty little secret that the
most important part of college, even more than getting a diploma,
is getting a really good internship.
No one tells you this directly to your face, and that’s
how the filtration system works. Once everyone gets wise to this
““ and I’m really taking one for the team here ““
the competition for internships will stiffen. I just wish somebody
had stressed this to me before the eve of graduation.
For you hard-nosed materialists demanding proof, according to a
survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employees, on a
list of the top 10 places employers find new hires, guess where
internship programs rank? No. 1.
But don’t listen to me; hear it from an accredited school
of hard-knocks swami.
“A good internship can be almost as important as a
diploma,” said Dario Bravo, a UCLA Career Center “God
of Information” and probably one of the most important people
you’ll ever meet.
It is a lamentable but undeniable truth that it is who you know,
and not what you know, that determines your chances of success in
that jungle outside of UCLA. This is an uncomfortable truth, and
one that is certainly repugnant to the high-minded principles of
academia.
I want to be clear that I’m neither knocking nor mocking
this prestigious and world-class institution. Getting in is no
picnic, as we all know. Getting in, however, is just the beginning
of the game.
Just remember that outside the gates of this noble institution
is a harsh world that plays by its own rules, and like it or not,
the name of the game is survival.
If you want to offer Lukacs an internship, e-mail him at
olukacs@media.ucla.edu.