Artsy graduates face hard facts

You’ve all heard the horror stories of recent college
graduates who end up living with their parents and working at the
local pet store, unable to find a real job. On graduation day, they
toss their cap triumphantly into the air and take a determined step
into the real world only to discover that their degree might not be
worth as much as they had anticipated.

Making the transition to the real world can be easier for some
than for others. Students who study engineering, for example, are
often offered jobs with competitive salaries straight out of
college. For those of us with non-specialized degrees, those of us
interested in literature and the arts, job-hunting can be a bit
more difficult. Furthermore, according to a survey by the National
Association of Colleges and Employers, students earning a degree in
chemical engineering or computer science in 2005 earned close to
$20,000 more than those with liberal arts degrees.

These days, online job listing sites offer some hope for
graduating students struggling to break away from their career in
burger-flipping. Current UCLA students have free access to the
Career Center’s searchable online job listings and they even
have counselors to offer you a shoulder to cry on when you realize
that after four years in college, you may be headed home to work in
the burger barn.

I spoke with Kathy Sims, the director of the UCLA Career Center,
and she told me that students with liberal arts degrees are often
surprised to find that many of the jobs available on BruinView cite
“any major” in their list of qualifications.

If this is the case, then why do we often hear the misconception
that students with non-specialized degrees should go to grad school
if they want to avoid working retail for the rest of their lives?
Sims said, “The companies recruiting for specialized degrees
tend to be the most visible on campus because they have bigger
recruiting budgets,” which would support the misconception
that there aren’t any jobs for artsy grads.

Still, just because a job will hire me with my “any
major” degree doesn’t mean I actually want to work for
that company. The harsh reality is, that while there may be jobs
available, many of them are a far cry from what I had in mind when
I signed up to be an English major. I envisioned a glamorous life
of traveling the world promoting my best-selling books and sipping
highballs with the next generation of Hunter Thompsons and Douglas
Adamses at fancy parties, but I have begun to realize how far off
these visions of boozey glory really were.

To see exactly what options I had, I decided to do a quick
search of the career center’s BruinView job listings, and I
got some interesting results. I wanted to keep my options open and
selected listings that ranged from advertising to writing to
teaching, hoping to get a wider selection of available jobs. The
majority of the listings were internships, but I did discover that
I was qualified to be a camp counselor. Also available was an
exciting career in data entry, which listed, “able to sit for
long periods of time” among its required qualifications.

This scares me. During my community college days I had a job
with this telemarketing company working alongside twenty-somethings
with degrees from UC Santa Barbara and a fifty-something with a
degree from UC Berkeley. I didn’t need a degree for that job
““ they would hire just about anybody ““ and now that I
am about to graduate college, I certainly don’t want to go
back to answering phones to pay the bills.

To be fair, there were two jobs listed that interested me and
seemed suited to my abilities, but for the most part, the listings
were rather meager. I don’t mean to undermine the career
center ““ it’s not their fault that liberal arts
students aren’t recruited for high-paying jobs out of
college. Actually, the career center can do a lot to help students
make the most of their degrees, but we have to take advantage of
what they have to offer before its too late.

Charles Voloshin, who graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 2004
with degrees in psychology and business, recently quit his job
working for an advertising agency. He says that many students think
they can get the job they want with any degree, but feels that this
is not necessarily true. He said, “people should spend more
time thinking about what they want to do with their lives before
their last quarter,” that way, they know what they are
getting into. He also notes that if he didn’t have his
business degree, his degree in psychology would be useless without
a graduate degree, adding, “I’d probably be waiting
tables somewhere.”

So, perhaps the real problem is that students don’t put
enough time into their major choices. Ideally, we would be able to
get paid for doing something that we love to do, but I suppose we
all must face the fact that this isn’t an ideal world.

While it’s probably too late for me (I just applied for
the camp counselor gig) I recommend that students start thinking
about their careers as early as freshman year.

Beyond the protective walls of UCLA, there exits a world
comprised of all the terrifying realities of careers, families and
mortgages. I know we are all busy with studying for finals and
writing papers, but my advice to you all is to start thinking about
your careers early. If you don’t, you might just end up
another lost soul with a college degree and a data entry job.

Here’s to the arts.

Do you want to sip highballs with dead writers? Would you
settle for Justin Deitchman instead? Tell him at
jdeitchman@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.

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