neorants

I’m sitting here at the IUS computer lab with my fianceé, while she tries in futility to find a machine that can access the network printer she needs. What an exciting afternoon! Ah, the things one does for love. :-p

For some reason, I always feel more than a little out of place when I end up on a college campus for one reason or another. You see, I withdrew from West Virginia University before I graduated, because I was underwhelmed by their CS program, which was my major. Sure, I learned all sorts of great stuff in my communications, philosophy, and Japanese classes, but I was paying the big bucks for a CS degree, and they had us coding in Ada for the first two years. Couldn’t help but feel like I was wasting my time learning how to use data structures and perform flow control in yet ANOTHER language that isn’t being used outside of the government and academia. Of course, after you got the basics down for the first two years in a language that was so incredibly strict it sapped the creativity right out of you, you could move on to C.

Anyway, enough about my frustrations with higher education. Now, I’m a 25 year old guy who’s been in the workforce for around 9 years, sitting here in a computer lab with a bunch of kids who hope and pray there’s a job waiting for them when they get out. I feel bad, because I know that despite the extra 4 or more years of their lives they’ve dedicated to preparing themselves, they’ll still have to face the same harsh reality we all do when we enter the working world. All too often, it isn’t what you know, but who you know.

I wish this weren’t the case. I wish that the most qualified person for a job always got it. If it worked that way, the job marketplace would be a much happier place to find oneself in. A little over a year ago, I applied for a one of several newly-created positions that had opened up within my company. I had a letter of recommendation from a manager at the company’s corporate offices literally gushing with praises, and a great resumé. I never got a call for so much as an interview. I found out later that the positions I had applied for had already been promised to existing employees of a company we’d bought out. Nobody else was actually being considered for the positions, but they had to post them anyway. This, my friends, is how the world works. My prayers go out to the IUS graduates of 2003. May you buck that trend and get the jobs you worked so hard for and so rightly deserve.

Now, time to slide over to another workstation, smile, nod, and generally behave as though the world is a much fairer place than it really is. That’s the only way anything will ever change.