UCLA graduates not prepared for life after college

  Maisha Elonai Elonai is finishing her
last quarter as an English student at UCLA. Like a good columnist,
she’ll stick her nose in anybody’s business. Feel free to return
the favor at [email protected].
Click Here for more articles by Maisha Elonai

Bruin life is a world full of change. For many of us, freshman
year is a painful, lonely time ““ we get lost on
Westwood’s curving streets, lost among residence hall
strangers, lost on the way to class, even lost in class. But we
bear through everything with high hopes that as the years go on,
school life will work out and we will leave the university with
plans and thorough training for our future careers.

For many undergraduates, the only thing worse than coming to
UCLA as a freshman is leaving UCLA as a senior with those hopes
crushed.

Take Joe Bruin, for example. Joe didn’t know what he
wanted to major in straight out of high school. He enrolled at UCLA
undeclared, thinking about pre-medical studies. Then he discovers
dancing. Joe winds up a world arts and cultures student doubling in
biology just to learn something “practical.”

But Joe’s bio grades are mediocre, and he doesn’t
get into medical school.

Joe graduates from UCLA waving a tutu in defiance. “Screw
medical school,” he figures. After all, he is cultured.

What Joe Bruin doesn’t know is that culture doesn’t
pay rent in the United States. The real career world with its
gleaming jaws is lurking just around the corner, waiting to ensnare
Joe in a mesh of financial debt. Then it plans to eat him
alive.

Many UCLA seniors like myself are caught off-guard by the same
predicament. While classes have taught us how to think, they do not
necessarily provide us with appropriate work skills. This makes us
perfect candidates for low-paying internships and entry-level
positions. And because we want to work our way up in the career
world, employers know we’ll break our backs for them to make
a good impression.

The purgatory period between an alumnus’s undergraduate
studies and his first real job can be nerve-wracking. Like him,
some of us still haven’t chosen a long-term career field.

Our lives go something like this: we move out of Westwood to the
cheapest studio-sized box we can find and drift from interview to
interview, admitting our minimal work experience, and wondering how
we will ever pay back our student loans. Eventually, we must
sacrifice salary, hours, location, and sometimes even personal
sanity just to find a job.

As we settle into work, we make our last and often most
disheartening discovery ““ we have no idea what we’re
doing.

Education begins all over again.

Some students are lucky. Some students have been happily running
their campus newspapers or programming Web sites since junior high.
They know what they want to do with their lives and will never have
to fumble through career training.

But for those of us who haven’t had hands-on experience
““ medical and law students who have never practiced with real
people, budding artists whose names are yet unrecognized, psych
students who don’t want to counsel, Letters and Science
students who haven’t specifically decided on a career ““
we are desperate to find a lucrative career for which we have some
training.

In some ways, UCLA curriculum fails to prepare us for this
hurdle. While our classes do train us to analyze and write, few
offer hands-on experience. Most courses focus on theory, discussion
of history, and memorization of terms. They might relate the
secrets of poetry ““ chiasmus appeals to a reader’s
sense of aesthetics by reversing a verse’s symmetry in a
series of phrases ““ but they don’t necessarily teach
students to write a good column on deadline.

In fact, UCLA is missing several basic programs that could help
students find a good career. There is no business major, only a
business and economics program with scant management courses. A
pre-law curriculum for undergraduates is not offered either.
Instead, there are only a few classes scattered across departments.
The only journalism “major” offered is a job at the
Daily Bruin and in ASUCLA Student Media.

UCLA coursework simply does a poor job of training students for
certain fields. The university teaches students life skills, not
work skills. It could easily offer students a more balanced
education by offering more vocationally-oriented classes, but until
such classes are instituted, students are on their own.

Fortunately, university life does offer us some advantages. UCLA
offers a few courses, such as Communication Studies 185, which give
students units for practicing fieldwork. Various associations offer
job fairs and career counseling on campus. And work study can
provide students with the necessary experience to successfully
apply for a job in the future.

Students should start looking early for a job. Many employers
require two to three years of experience in a similar field before
they will consider hiring an applicant. Landing an internship for a
stipend or college credit can help students minimize the time they
are unemployed or working for low wages after graduation.

Taking any job in college is better than entering the career
world without an employment history. Suffering through entry-level
work while still receiving parental support and/or student loans is
a much better alternative than struggling to pay bills without
help. Working also can help undecided students figure out which
career to pursue.

Limbo is not an exciting place to live. Take it from someone
graduating: prepare for the career world while you can. Otherwise,
a bachelor’s degree is nothing more than a label announcing a
student’s medial social status, and it is still possible to
get stuck working at Starbucks.