“1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed”
I saw this article on my lunch break yesterday. I’ve seen college friends nervously sharing it on Facebook. I’ve seen anti-Obama people spreading it on Twitter. It’s the sort of rare national news that personally impacts lots of people you know. College is supposed to be the path to prosperity, and when it’s not, you get a whole lot of ideas about what to do to fix the job market and what to do to help new graduates and what to do about student loans and what to do about the whole notion that college is the path to prosperity.
But as I read this article, I couldn’t help thinking that it suffers from the same nearsighted paradigm I discussed in my post a few months ago about Steve Jobs and the 99%. There’s a lot of talk about graduates “finding” jobs. There is absolutely no talk about graduates “creating” their own jobs.
As I said before, I realize that not everyone can start a business like Steve Jobs. If you’re a graduate with a degree in chemical engineering, creating your own job might have a pretty high barrier to entry. But the first interview in the AP article was a kid with a creative writing degree. He works at a coffeehouse, and the article makes it sound like the only thing he is doing right now about his degree is hopelessly sending in resumes. “He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career.”
What?! Are you serious?! There might be more options to advance a writing career today than there has ever been!
Have you tried writing a novel during your coffeehouse breaks? OK, maybe that’s too much of a long shot (but have you even thought about it?). What about publications that accept and pay for short stories? Still too hard? Guess what? Self-publishing is easier now than it’s ever been. If you don’t want to invest a lot of time into a book, try your hand at e-books! It’s getting easier all the time to publish e-books and drop them into the growing e-book marketplaces. It doesn’t have to be fiction. You can do non-fiction summaries of things. You can do tutorials. Figure out what’s selling that you’re kind of interested in and figure out how to do something better and cheaper than what’s already out there. Browse Craigslist for freelance writing gigs. Learn how to start a blog and experiment with earning income from it.
Those are just things you can do by yourself. Find some other creative friends and write scripts and create shows on YouTube. Go around town and interview people and create a documentary about anything. Start an open mic night with your poetry at your coffeehouse.
These are just the things I’ve thought of in the last half-hour or so. You can use your imagination, your experience, and your network to think of more. Sure, some of them are easier or more practical than others. But they are all ways for people with interests in writing to take the skills they’ve hopefully learned in college and use them to gain some real-world experience that can either directly generate income or create opportunities for income in the future. (Subscribe to /r/Entrepreneur to stoke those motivational fires)
Or, you know, you can just fire off resumes to faceless organizations and hope for the best.
I know. Everyone is not an entrepreneur. But we suffer from a dangerous and false paradigm when we pretend that the possibilities of entrepreneurship don’t even exist. Like I said back in October:
If you’re reading this, you just proved that you have free time and access to the Internet. Do you realize that those two things give you almost unlimited opportunity? …Don’t accept a mentality that you are stuck where you are, and that the only way you can get ahead is by taking from others. If you can’t find a job, create it. Teach yourself. Improve yourself. Think Different.