What happens when you can’t bring yourself to open another book, write another sentence, attend one more soul-sucking class, and you still have another year (at least) left of college? I guess it’s called junioritis.
There is nothing I want to do less than write the two 10-page papers I have due next week, or finish a take-home exam, or especially write this column.
The ivory tower is getting to me.
I have all these friends — well, acquaintances — in the English department who keep asking me about graduate school, or my thesis that I mistakenly thought was a good idea to write, and I simply want to hit them over the head with a copy of “The Norton Anthology of Literature.” Hardcover.
Maybe it’s the wreck that totaled my car last week that jogged something ?inside me.
And that something inside me is shouting that everything is a gigantic waste of time, and I can’t get it to shut up.
But I can’t listen. I can’t just “throw it all away,” so ?to speak.
But, then again, what would I be throwing away? We all know that finding a paid position related to what we studied in college after graduation is becoming a pipe dream.
In 2013, the unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22-27 was 5.6 percent, which really doesn’t sound that bad.
However, among 22-year-olds with a degree who have found employment in the past three years, more than half were in positions that did not require a college degree.
Now that’s concerning. Because that means we have a lot of young college graduates making $8 per hour ?at Starbucks.
It’s statistics like these that exacerbate my junioritis, but also, paradoxically, make me want to stay in school forever to delay my entrance into a world that doesn’t want to employ me.
It’s statistics like these that force so many arts and humanities majors like myself into the cesspool of arrested development that is graduate school.
Oh, Mom, why didn’t you force me into something STEM?
But wait, before we get all STEM-happy here, consider this information from the U.S. Census Bureau: 74 percent of those who have a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field don’t actually have a job within STEM.
This comes as a surprise to me, as I naturally assumed everything was peachy in the world of “serious” majors like science, technology, engineering and math.
I guess I’m just having one of those end-of-the-year freakouts that plague college students’ existence.
Everything’s not all that bad. And I know I’m not the only one feeling this way.
The thought that comforts me is also the thought that reminds me of just how selfish I am: There’s always going be somebody out there worse off.
zipperr@indiana.edu
