Why Are You Here?
Maximizing the Return on Your School Investment
Jacob Eliosoff, 1997
Try this: in ten words or less, sum up why you're in university. Now,
in a university of this size there'll always be a few freaks with
answers like "scamming student loans", "hiding out from
parents/ex-lover/police", "love of learning" and so on. But the vast
majority of answers will include words like "jobs" and "employability"
and maybe even "desperate". Whether it was picked up like a
contagious disease during privileged childhoods or acquired in long
summers of living and working with those who lack it, most of us have
enough ambition to know that the life of welfare lines and temp
service indenture ain't for us, so we bust our ass a bit for three or
four years to improve our odds of making it into the fabled land of
expensive meals, BMW's and pensioned retirements.
I have no problem with this reasoning - I'm in computer science, where
it's perfectly understood and talked about by everyone, in the form of
code words like "applications" and "Java" and "Bill". But after four
years here I can't help but notice how many of you have managed to
completely miss some basic realities about this little quest.
The prime culprits here are the legions of students at McGill who
spend all their waking hours studying, taking notes, sucking up and
generally nurturing ulcers in pursuit of their great holy grail, the
high GPA. Just put in those extra hours at the library or sucking
prof's dick or whatever, the myth goes, and it'll all pay off when you
walk out of here with that straight-A transcript, into the open arms
of the drooling employer of your choice.
Now, it's not that this idea doesn't contain a solid chunk of truth in
it. Every job interview I've ever had points to the fact that
employers do look for high marks, so don't count on prospective
employers to be blown away by your extensive Star Trek
extracurriculars. But with the exception of a few overachievers
headed for grad school who are stuck with it, what on earth is the
point of going to all that work for a few nice numbers on a page when
completely indistinguishable results can be achieved with a pair of
scissors, a glue stick and a decent quality photocopier?
I've applied for a lot of jobs in my life, some of them with big,
established, desirable employers - the kind of place a lot of you will
be nervously applying when McGill gives you your precious piece of
paper. They all asked me my marks, they all listened to the answer,
and not one of them went to any trouble to check them. Of course,
employers are perfectly entitled to request a formal copy from Dawson
Hall. This process involves a small fee and, having needed one for an
exchange application once, I can say that it's quite impervious to
your friendly student tamperer. Fortunately for us it's also a big
pain in the ass, and next to no one bothers with it. Microsoft flew
me to Seattle, interviewed me four times, paid my room service but
never bothered to ask for a paper copy of my transcript! (In one of
the luckiest moments of my life they then turned me down because I
didn't know how to computer program, but that's another story.)
Yes, kids, it's true - for anyone who doesn't twitch compulsively
every time they exaggerate a bit, walking into a job interview with
what looks like an impressive transcript is the easy part. Now, I
know a lot of you will resist this truth with the irrational
fierceness common to all suckers who've been taken. In high school
you were in your room geeking out while everybody else seemed to be
having fun, and here I am spoiling your long-anticipated revenge - the
part where the class clown who always made fun of your bookish habits
and complete lack of personality shows up later in life driving your
golf cart or whatever. Well, the good news is, those years were
wisely spent. You need good marks to get into a place like McGill;
high school marks are (generally) floated around in stuffy
bureaucracies beyond the reach of most teenage gluestick-wielders, and
cheating in high school, while perfectly practicable in many respects,
is more a sort of ongoing art form than the One Big Bluff of a job
application.
For those first fifteen years of formal education, marks-grubbing was
a sound investment, an important step on the path to suburbia. But
what so many of you failed to notice was that once you get to
university, the rules change in a subtle but fundamental way. For
many of us, that report card from second-last term in CEGEP or high
school was the last school record anyone will get to scrutinize in our
lives; people staying in the school system have to play by the kiddie
rules for a few more years, but for most of us it's all ties,
bullshit, and Xerox from here on in. Of course having legitimate good
marks can't hurt, but at some point you have to face up to the fact
that all those extra hours at the library are more some kind of
delusional bad habit than any sort of worthwhile investment.
Having alienated and, indeed, ridiculed the keener crowd, let me make
myself perfectly clear: university is not a waste of time;
skipping all your classes and spending your days in a permanent
pot-induced stupor is not a checkpoint on the fasttrack to
success. The keeners will do fine, and more often than not, the high
school dropout who walks into an interview with a 3.95-GPA McGill
transcript won't get the job. The point I'm making is that the
success of either applicant has nothing to do with their official
marks. The crucial question that should immediately come to mind is,
what essential skill is it that distinguishes the successful
university grad from the wannabe in the eyes of your average moronic
human resources interviewer? The answer can be summed up in one word:
terminology.
The fact is, for people headed into the job market, 95% of what you
learn in university - formulas, facts, the whole shebang - is useless.
The first thing you'll do once you're hired for any decently
sophisticated job is spend a while learning to do the stuff they
actually want you to do. There are jobs that you can be trained for
in school, but they tend to involve things like sweat and lower back
pain that most of us here would rather avoid, and McGill considers
itself far too important to bother teaching them.
Besides, even if real jobs relied on stuff you learn in school, the
job itself is secondary. The number one concern for any would-be
employee is the interview, and rightly so. Firing people is a pain in
the ass - it costs money, hurts morale, and next thing you know some
picket-wielding union bastard scratches your Lexus! Consequently,
keeping a job once you've got it is an achievable and perfectable
skill, qualified or not. Besides, impressing your interviewer is a
remarkably similar task to impressing your coworkers, your clients,
and your boss.
And the trick to a good interview is terminology. Nothing makes a
better impression on your interrogator than the vague sense that boy,
you really know what you're talking about. The language changes from
field to field: in Computer Science we throw around terms like big-O,
object-oriented, and NP-complete, in Philosophy they say weird things
like "consists in" and "I would want to say that...", and any
department has a healthy selection of isms to pick from -
deconstructionism, structuralism, Marxism, post-Freudianism, they're
all there for you to bludgeon laymen with. In Law they learn to wield
a lot of Latin, the great-granddaddy of linguistic one-upmanship,
which is why lawyers rule the world.
But in any field it's the same game: know the appropriate buzzwords,
learn to string them together in intimidating spurts, use them with
attitude. It's not important that you actually know what you're
talking about, but you have to sound like you do, and it's extremely
helpful if whoever you're talking to doesn't. If you detect that the
interviewer isn't completely up on something you're spouting off
about, press the point; this is your chance to take the conversation
somewhere you're more comfortable than he is and kick him around for a
while. Ideally, you want to leave him feeling like he really has to
hire you, just so that later when you're running the company you might
let him keep his job. Bringing a fellow human being to this level of
subjugation may make you feel like an asshole, but remember, job
interviews are the key step in the whole employment process, the
pivotal moment of your career. It's a rough sport. Kids get hurt.
Of course if you're here for the education, you don't need to think
this way. But face it: you're not. You could learn a hell of a lot
more about life engaging in small-time fraud, or teaching English in
South Korea, or manning the deck on a Finnish fishing ship, than you
ever will cramming in the libraries and getting drunk at Gert's with
your clones. You're here to get a job. So face up to that fact and
get your fucking priorities straight. Attend class - when you smell
the opportunity to pick up some vicious new words. Do the reading -
when it contributes to your lexical toolbag. Learn to speak in the
confident tones of a skilled professional, pick up some Latin,
practice with your gluestick and keep the bullshit flowing, because
that, my friends, is what education is all about.
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