Ambition for admission

My December 2008 graduation, rather than a mortarboard tossing, silly-string coated affair, was grim. The ceremony took place on a bitterly blustery grey day. Black-clad graduates herded silently to their chairs as a tinny “Pomp and Circumstance” piped in over the gym's sound system. The keynote speech drifted from the promise of youth to George Washington Carver to something about a man jumping out of a plane with a backpack full of silverware. "Are we the jumper?" I remember thinking. No one mentioned the crushing recession in progress in the world outside that wood-floored gym, the near-nil chance that many of us had of finding work in the coming months, the decades’ worth of student loan debt that we 22 year-olds now had to bear in such an environment. No one mentioned these things, but no one was reading aloud Oh, the Places You’ll Go! either.

I’m being dramatic, of course. But no more dramatic than the daily news at that time. Two months prior, the world economy had bottomed out, leaving predictions of mass unemployment, investments flatlining, a new Great Depression. Overnight we were stuck with the fallout of years of corruption and mismanagement from our elders in finances and government. Younger undergrads had years left to wait out this recession. Our slightly older peers who had graduated a few years before us had work experience to put on their resume. We were just 500 kids with liberal arts degrees. No wonder we were glum. At that ceremony my only moment of happiness came when the dean correctly pronounced my name handing me my diploma.
Without a job, my plans for moving somewhere cosmopolitan and vibrant, living alone without roommates, and laying the foundations for a career were out of the question. I moved back into my bedroom in my parents’ house, which they accommodated wonderfully but signaled to me a regression to my (shudder) high school days. I applied to hundreds of jobs, first in government and international relations, then any sort of office job, and finally jobs waiting tables and in retail. I couldn’t even get an interview. I ended up working as a waitress at a restaurant downtown. This was fine at first but as the recession continued the restaurant was so strapped that the kitchen couldn’t afford soap for the dishwasher. Management couldn't make payroll for months at a time. In the fall of this year, I decided to quit and become a “professional intern” for the International Relations Council and a local politician in hopes of gaining a little work experience and maybe a modicum of self-worth.

But these are stopgap measures. Almost one year after graduation, the economy is recovering but employment rates are not. I enjoy my work as an IRC intern but still can’t find what most would call a “real” job. Luckily I have my family to lean on, and no one to support financially as millions of other unemployed workers do. Times are tough everywhere, and we're all trying to figure out how to cope. I can manage this way for a long time. And yet, the recession and accompanying high unemployment rates will continue for years. Already, all this time spent looking for work and making do with what I can find is time that could have been invested in a career track that might allow me to become a diplomat, or a foreign service officer, or to work overseas as I wished. That time is lost, but I don’t want to spend what’s left of my youth waiting and cursing forces beyond my control.

That's why I'm trying something different this fall: I’m applying to graduate school to study international relations. I will blog here at the IRC about the application process, covering picking schools to apply to, graduate school fairs, finances, and standardized tests. Comments, questions and suggestions are welcome (I want to hear your stories!). Stay tuned for more updates on the process, and good luck to everyone out there in these tough times. --From Lucia, your friendly neighborhood IRC intern.