STANFORD: Done anything about a job?
ALFRED: Some. The job market is miserable. How about you?
STANFORD: Big headache. I've narrowed the choice between IBM and Exxon, and I can't decide. What kind of job are you looking for?
ALFRED: Anything that pays.
Both men are in a crisis situation, but with an obvious difference. The Stanford cousin with marketable training can pick and choose. His concern is to decide between two of the best employers in the country. The liberal-arts cousin will go with anyone who will pay him a salary. He may have to settle for an entry-level job with any organization that will have him.
Even a man from Mars could detect the contrast in preparation, attitude, and prospects of these two people. Preparation, attitude, and prospects-these three factors form a tight braid on which hangs an individual's fate in that terra incognita known as "first-job country." In that land, uncertainties of a dozen kinds lurk like predators in the underbrush. The intensity of worry makes the first job hunt one of the most severe crises the careerist will ever face. Listen to one recent graduate, embittered and unemployed: "I put in four years at college and might just as well have spent them in Disneyland. Here I am out of school eight months and the best I can do to earn money is part-time typing." She adds, "Some people get it right. A B.A. who roomed with me in my junior year-she majored in art history-got herself a job as a management trainee. But she knew someone in the company."
Lack of preparation punishes about a third of those who have been educated but not vocationally trained. As one authority puts it, "Students who come out of school without marketable skills have been taught how to solve all the world's problems except one-how to find a job."
Not all people are banged about by doubt and uncertainty. Some find in the graduation-to-job situation all the ingredients of a grand ball. Buoyed up by the cresting wave of graduation, they go surging along toward the job world, confident that they are headed for good jobs, good pay, good future.
But they are a lucky minority. Even among these are some with insecurity lurking beneath a thin crust of optimism. Most are less hopeful. They expect struggle and adopt a take-the-best-you-can-get goal-which may not be much.
Talk to people undertaking a voyage and you find, underneath the excitement, a pervasive anxiety. The level of uneasiness is highest among those who don't know what to expect at the other end.
College graduates looking up at the work-world heights have a varied range of expectation. For most, the trip from academia to the first job seems more like a trip to the moon than between any two points on the planet Earth.
A complication for the college undergraduate is that he or she faces two crises: one immediately past; one impending. Just as the level of bliss at becoming a senior is attained, the job hunt darkens the horizon. The ultimate school stage, instead of being a restful plateau, proves to be a catapult wound up and ready to toss graduates willy-nilly into a world that not only didn't they make, but one that seems to promise quick anointment into victimhood.
Here's the way that experience seemed to undergraduate Alan G. Ampolsk, '81, in the Columbia Spectator.
For years I have heard about being a Senior in College. Whenever I felt frustrated by the present my family would remind me about it. "Someday," they said, "you'll be a Senior in College." I knew what it meant, too. Immense freedom. The end of confinement. A future overflowing with possibilities . . .
"Welcome to your Senior year in College," said the letter from the Dean. He was enthusiastic. "I see you're a religion major. That's excellent, just excellent. You know we have so few Liberal Arts majors these days . . . any medical school would be happy to have you. . . ."
"So," asked my family, "What's it like being a Senior in college?"
My advisor smiled. "What do you plan to be doing this time next year?"
"Ah . . . living . . . somehow ..."
"Nothing more specific? You ought to give some thought to where you want to wind up . . ."
I thought again. "Something fulfilling . . . that I won't regret . . . fulfilling and just . . . and stimulating . . . and relatively prosperous."
"Well, law schools are glutted. Graduate schools aren't, but that's only because there's no work. . . ."
The responses registered by those experiencing the transition from school to work constitute a unique syndrome, a career equivalent of mal de mer that may reach extremes of frustration and sense of failure. Some people- those who are more aware-feel the roots of childhood and youth being ripped up. They sense the difference between the life being left behind and the one they are about to enter. And the realization dawns that they are not tourists passing through. Whatever the land of their destination turns out to be, they must live there.
Professor Anthony Athos of Harvard says, "The average young graduate leaving the campus today rents a cap and gown, shakes hands with the college president, accepts his diploma amidst a burst of ceremony...." Following which he tries to find a niche in an alien environment and then "the real world hits him hard and right between the eyes."
If you talk to people who are breasting the job market, the deep levels of their emotions usually come through. Here are three comments from among those we queried about their anticipations:
Jason Eppley, 23 years old, at Baruch College, City University of New York, has positive feelings about his employability. "I feel free at last, almost the way Martin Luther King meant. My first job is going to give me the liberty I want, financial independence, getting out from under my parents' control, entering a new world. I'll be a man, man."
Sarah Deland, twenty-two and a communications major at a West Coast college, was considerably less sanguine. "It's like going into a dentist's office. I know it will be unpleasant. People aren't going to be throwing welcome mats at my feet. I've heard my brother moaning and groaning about having a tough boss, being part of a demoralized work group-and that's all after you get the damn job.
"And even at this late date, my mother is nagging me to learn steno and typing so that I can get a job in a big company with eligible men around. I feel as though I'm being pulled in seven directions, and I don't want to go in any of them."
This young woman's outlook was dismal enough. But of all our interviewees, a graduate of a small college in Pennsylvania gave us the most chilling answer. He said, "I got out of college two months ago. I remember my graduation day clearly. After the ceremony, I walked down the stairs of the main building, and I knew I was leaving my best days behind me."
For those graduating into a less protective world, it is not only school that is being left behind. The world of teachers and texts is but part of the cocoon that is cast off. The first two comments we quoted reflect that broader world.
Jason Eppley, exulting in his impending freedom, men-tions the restrictions from which he is escaping-parental control, financial dependence-as he passes from youth to adulthood in a kind of ecumenical bar mitzvah offering liberty that, unfortunately, may be matched by built-in servitude.
And Sarah Deland speaks of the family influence that converts her indecisiveness into anxiety. She is blocked from anticipating some of the possible benefits of change because her mother's marriage hints prevent her from committing herself to the challenges of the job world.
To the outsider looking in, the tensions of first-job seeking seem exaggerated. One assistant personnel director who interviews job applicants says, "These young people seem to think they are in a life-and-death situation. This is unreal. Although the people I see are generally not from affluent homes, they do have resources that can keep them healthy and well fed indefinitely. Yet many get to the hys-terical point before they land something."
This could be the cool view of the uninvolved practi-tioner who has adjusted to others' discomfort by an emotional callus. However, the observation may be explained not by hysteria but by a below-surface struggle as powerful as it is unconscious.
The theater has a word for it: A director will talk of the action of a play and refer to the subtext, the hidden feelings and motivation that give the drama its richness. It is the subtext that explains why Goethe's Faust continues to grip the imagination of audiences. We empathize with Faust not because he is fighting the machinations of Mephistopheles but because we see in his struggles our own, our tragic resistance to old age and death.
Or consider King Kong. Why are we so fascinated by the story of an apelike monster fighting his human captors? We sense a symbolic confrontation of which we are a part, a primitive force struggling against an implacable civilization that eventually promises to crush him and us.
In the same way, the struggle of the young graduate is not simply to find a job. It is to do a number of other things that contribute muted but powerful concerns. For example:
To prove oneself; to show others-family, peers, friends-one's capability and worthiness.
To start a career that may reach admirable heights and satisfy aspirations, or confine one to pits of mediocrity and low levels of accomplishment.
And above all, to establish identity, to update the answer to that continually urgent question, "Who am I?" in a favorable way.
