An English grad should have no difficulties in finding entry level positions, and a grad who produced as a student should have no trouble entering graduate or professional programs.
The OP’s grad has some growing up to do.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have lumped them together, but I disagree with both of these viewpoints.
Masonite stated
Max Torque stated
and
Sure, there are brilliant folks who don’t go an elite school (or ANY school for that matter) and there a few idiots who get into Yale by having the right parents / private school / etc., but I think the overall level of intellectual discourse is going to be much higher at Yale than virtually anywhere else. For that matter, at Yale (which turned me down) than at UVa (which I attended).
Perhaps it’s hard to make my case (which is a hijack in any event) in a thread written by such an obnoxious whiny brat.
She got into Yale with “just shy of a 1400” SAT. That is quite unacceptably low for such a school. She should thank God that she even got in and got to spend time on a beautiful college campus for 4 years.
I went to an Ivy League school (Dartmouth. BTW, the Ivy League is just a sports league with no scholarships) and I wonder who’s ass she even kissed to get in. Let’s smack the girl on the ass and sign her up for welfare ASAP. Motivation still counts for a lot in this capitalistic country.
<I>I was sure the payoff would be a multitude of attractive, not to mention lucrative, job offers upon graduation. Then the bottom dropped out of the economy.</I>
And exactly how much research did you do to come to this conclusion?
English majors have always had a hard time getting jobs. And getting lucrative jobs right out of college – that’s hard even for electrical engineers (who at least learn an actual profession).
Got a lot of Ivy League friends. About 1/2 are really sharp and motivated. The other 1/2 are like this gal, reasonably bright, but zero common sense.
One question: How many 17-18-year olds do you know who know exactly what profession to pursue after graduation?
Forgive me if I sound indignant – I’m not trying to be – but, unless someone that age has amazing foresight, not to mention maturity to research what profession s/he aspires to and applies him/herself accordingly once in college, s/he is going to graduate into the real world with a similar outlook – hopefully, though, not as whiny.
I was a humanities major too (literature and drama), and, except for teaching English in an urban middle school for a few years, my education has never coincided with how I make a living (I also have a M.Ed). I’ve waited tables, typed endless forms, sold sheets, towels, lingerie, and shoes in a major department store…I could go on and on.
I had NO idea what profession to pursue when I entered college. When I graduated, I still didn’t have much of an idea, but I did know that being a humanities person wasn’t going to rake in big bucks. When the reality hit, I was as shell-shocked as Shawna, not to mention indignant, probably a bit whiny, etc. The difference was that I didn’t let my pride dictate as how I should earn a living.
In a way, I feel sorry for her. I hope she learns a harsh lesson from all this. It’d be interesting to see if the newspaper prints any responses…
This woman may have a high IQ but I wouldn’t call her smart. She’s got a great pedigree that will open doors in industry, corporations and finance, and network around the world. All she’s doing is bitching about how she should already have her piece of the pie. Dang, she’s got advantages that most college grads would kill for, and she’s just pissing and moaning about what’s owed to her instead of doing some aggressive marketing herself.
That said, I think that the Ivy league system, and especially the Ivy League MBA programs tend to instill this superior attitude into their graduates. Certainly more so than say the University of California.
It is a grave mistake our society has been in the process of making over the last couple decades to require qualifications from the newly-graduated. It leads to tunnel-vision, interdisciplinary conflict, lower productivity because no one can catch his colleague’s mistakes, and a lessening of the quality of our discourse because no one can speak to a person outside their field about anything more interesting than the weather. As a philosophy major from an excellent school, I could have done any job you asked with a few months of training, even if it demanded vast technical knowledge, because I had been schooled in analytic processes and learning techniques.
But I wasn’t nearly this snooty when I had to get a job working retail after I graduated.
–Cliffy
I absolutely disagree, and research doesn’t back you up.
Liberal arts graduates may not get the best jobs after graduation, but down the road they do better (in the corporate) than their peers who chose a more vocationally-oriented major. At & T did a study like this in the 1980s and I know there’s been a major study since with a similar finding.
And for Max Torque, Yale doesn’t offer a major in marketing or journalism or communications. I imagine this is due to its beliefs about the values of liberal vs. vocational education, attitudes which it has clearly failed to pass on or explain to our friend Shawna.
<cue Kirsty MacColl’s cover of The Smith’s “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby”>
At the end of her op-ed piece in the AJC, after complaining that she can’t get the kind of job she thinks she merits, Shawna Gale asks “Will someone please tell me where I went wrong?”
Well, I’d say her first mistake is confusing getting a degree with getting an education, and the second, even bigger, mistake is thinking that employers hire degrees. Yet another was failing to understand that the boom economy, which is the only kind kids her age have ever known, was going to end at some time, and that it’s not the natural order of things for entry-level positions for English majors to pay $45K-$50K/year and up.
Everything in her article indicates that she’s trying to market her degree to employers, instead of marketing the benefits of the education that her degree represents. She alludes to the skills that she’s acquired in the course of her degree-acquisition process, but only in passing and in terms that suggest she doesn’t really value them herself. She wants a job in marketing or advertising, but doesn’t understand enough about either to package what she has to sell in a way that’s attractive to such employers. I wouldn’t hire her either, and I’ve made a career out of hiring people with non-technical, humanities-oriented degrees into technical professions and watching them thrive.
It’s awfully hard not to regard Ms. Gale as just another spoiled brat who wants her piece of pie RIGHT NOW. I too have a degree in English, from a moderately well-regarded private liberal arts college. Our SAT scores were comparable (my math score kept my overall number down). I graduated from college with honors, a 3.6 GPA, and with one National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship already under my belt. I was accepted directly from college into Ph.D. programs in English lit at Yale, Virginia, and Emory, among others. When I decided to bail out of grad school (in 1987), my first job was as a part-time proofreader at an ad agency, for about $7.50/hr. When I convinced them to hire me full time, it was at a salary of $14.5K/yr. Within 18 months, I’d increased that to $21K, and had been given significant additional responsibilities, including quite a bit of copywriting for the projects that the staff copywriters considered beneath them. I ended up in print production, then in the technology business, each position building on those before it, so that in my last position, fifteen years after quitting grad school, I was making over six times what I did starting out. It sounds like anything under six figures is chump change to Ms. Gale, but I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished, and I consider my education (though not necessarily my degree) an essential part of what’s allowed me to do it.
Amen to that! Not to mention confusing scoring 1400 on the SAT as being “smart”.
I took the SAT in middle school, and got an award at a nearby college for scoring well on it.
Did I have ANY CLUE WHAT THE HELL I WAS DOING?
Nope.
Did I even read the questions?
Nope. I was mad at my mother because she made me take the dumb test, and so was just filling in circles until I could get outta there and go back home to my Atari. :rolleyes:
I DID do well enough on the SAT in High School (when I was actually TRYING), but I am here to tell you that while I may be considered “smart” (whatever that means), I will bet you money that my oldest sister, who is mentally retarded, would make a better “Survivor” than I EVER would!
Honey, she’d be walking with that cash, do you hear me?
So if you ask me, this gal IS attributing arbitrary qualifications to employability (and what is she complaining about–at least she’s PUBLISHED, which I ain’t).
And as for the SAT, well, my theory on that is something akin to the “1,000 chimps with 1,000 typewriters” theory. 
And as for finding a job…? I’m an English major, and am about 30 pages away from an M.A. in Lit…
…and I am working in Finance, at a non-profit (but I’m not complaining… it’s my first “grown-up” job, which I didn’t get until I was 29!).
Oh, and by the way, when I was hired for the job I have now, my boss told me that, although there had been other applicants with experience that matched the position better, he chose me because I seemed like less of a “tight-ass” than the other applicants. 
I’m sure most 17-18 year olds don’t know exactly what profession they want to pursue, but at some point prior to graduation, they ought to have some idea of what they want to do, and of the job prospects for a particular major.I ended up doing something very different from what I expected, but I knew that a bachelor’s in psychology would only qualify me to a) go to graduate school or b) get the sort of job that requires a degree, any degree. I didn’t expect to get a well-paying job,doing exactly what I wanted immediately, so I didn’t get indignant or whiny when it didn’t happen.My friends, who wanted to be in “business” although they didn’t know what type or position,worked on BBA’s and had every reason to expect the relatively well-paying jobs they got in finance and marketing
So after spending a few years reading many books about people facing hardship, often written by struggling authors, at an English department noted for its work in feminist literature in which stories are told of how women in particular face tough challenges, the OP has now graduated but entirely failed to relate what she has learned in the last few years to her own life.
I would disagree with that statement- at the moment, Dartmouth’s average SAT score is 1415, Brown’s is 1380, Columbia’s is 1394, Cornell’s is 1360, Princeton is 1490, UPenn is 1385, and I couldn’t find Harvard or Yale. But I wouldn’t say that close to 1400 is an unusually low score for an Ivy, and she took the SAT before the recentering, which means it would be higher now anyway.
You went to Dartmouth? Woo! Tell me, is the granite of New Hampshire still in your muscles and your brains? (In case you are at all interested in this sort of thing, Renegade Librarian and I were/are also students. I’m starting up spring quarter come Monday.)
What is 1400 in percentile terms?
I read English at a leading UK university. I was well aware it wasn’t highly unlikely to give me direct entry into any job except academia. Even teaching English would require another year’s study for a PGCE certificate.
One option was a “milkround job” - where leading management consultancy and accountancy firms woo final-year students into fairly well-paid jobs with them. You still end up studying damn hard for another 1-2 years to get a proper business grounding and training, and there are exams (chartered accountancy for some I think).
However I wanted to be a journalist, so during my degree I did every bit of work experience I could - all unpaid, often at some personal expense eg if I had to stay in another city during a vacation to do work experience at a TV station - and worked for student newspapers, radio, etc. Then I did a postgraduate journalism course, during AND after which I did more unpaid work experience, as well as paid office temping to keep afloat.
A month or so after finishing the postgrad I was lucky enough to get “a proper paid job” in my chosen career. I found out later it was some work experience I’d done at another TV station in the same city as that job that sparked my employer’s interest, and got me the interview.
I didn’t then - and I don’t now - see why any employer in journalism or any other field should take me on just because of my degree. You need to get experience in - AND DEMONSTRATE INTEREST IN - the career field you want to pursue.
Agreed, but I’d like to add that while this is true enough nowadays, it wasn’t always so. There was a time when simply graduating with a liberal arts degree opened doors to many careers.
My own parents were of this mindset; they were not very happy when I suggested that some kind of career experience during school might be beneficial when looking for work after graduation. They felt that working would take my concentration away from schoolwork, and since I’d have a degree from a well-regarded Canadian school, employers would be lining up to hire me. After all, it worked for people of my parents’ generation.
Well, it didn’t work that way for me, and like our friend Shawna, I found myself with a (once-prestigious) degree but without a job. However, unlike Shawna, I reasoned that I had to do something and ended up being a janitor before landing a low-paying entry-level job in a field where I could grow (technical writing).
I’ve been able to parlay that first opportunity into a comfortable living, but I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t been willing to start at the bottom. And willing to go back to it from time to time too; with the ups and downs of the economy over the last 20 years, I’ve had to take some jobs that had absolutely nothing to do with having a degree. But they kept me going.
My advice to Shawna, since she has no career experience at graduation, would be to take what she can get. Better to start at the bottom of a career she can grow into, but having any job at this stage is better than whining about not having one in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Deal with it, Shawna, and accept the reality of the situation. Nobody wants to pay you big bucks just because you have a piece of paper from Yale. They will hire you if you can prove that you’re worth something, but that will take time. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but if you learned enough from Yale to earn a degree, you can learn this too. I did.
I’m curious about the Constitution’s reasons for publishing it.
Some editor some, “Okay, we’ll publish you.”, smirking inside anticipating the response of the readership.
Was this an example of:
- tough love (shocking her into a more realistic state)?
- “get off my back” (just got tired of the phone calls)?
- Another too-little-news day?
She can parley THIS into a (brief) career. Go on Oprah to discuss her angst. Write a shocking expose of Ivy League literature programs, or a psychobabble self-help book. Box Tonya Harding.
If she wants some quick money, she should try out for The Weakest Link. I would enjoy seeing her professionally scorned on national TV.
Don’t fear Shawna. I’ve heard Fox is going to try again with Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire.
Oh yeah, and I love this,“I worked harder in high school… I rode horses. I played tennis and basketball”.
I thought those were supposed to be fun.
As I reread this, I feeling a bit more sympathy. I’m starting to wonder a lot more about her parents.
She may have been among many kids driven to overachieve by relentless, professionally successful parents who COULD NOT ABIDE a “failure”. Perhaps she was promised these careers rewards by THEM. Or perhaps a parent had some failed dream they she was being pushed to fulfill by proxy.
So maybe she deserves some slack. Less heaping scorn, and more sympathetic clucking, as folks more grounded in the real world (and Yale, for all its vaunted educational prowess, is not the best place for this) show her the real ropes.
For that matter, getting a degree in English is supposed to be fun. I don’t blame employers for not wanting to hire her, because she sounds snotty and immature, but I do feel sorry for the girl. She seems to have missed the best part of what college has to offer – curling up at the coffeehouse with a book of poetry, getting into friendly arguments with professors, enjoying the plays and films and speakers campuses attract. For all her coursework in English, she’s also missed the vital lesson of Horace and Herrick and Shakespeare: savor the moment, youth’s a stuff will not endure. Poor kid.