14th
Brief thoughts: “the recent graduate”
The problem of the recent graduate is as follows:
People pay for the perception of value. In the world of mission statements, workplans, and tasklists, this means discrete use cases, requiring discrete skills. In the world of high academia (Berkeley), they don’t teach you skills. It ain’t trade school. But your graduate status serves as a proxy for the ability to do — or rather, learn — certain things in short order.
The recent graduate, therefore, is the jack-of-all-trades. Unfortunately, “all-trades” is really a bin of skills that are quickly developed by the bright, but easily deadening to the intellectual (particularly to the very demographic, so attuned to knowledge as its own end, that the successful recent graduate represents).
So what’s the trick? Find the skills that meet two criteria:
- They’re interesting enough to you to constitute more than the knowledge-economy equivalent of a pin factory job
- The people with the money perceive that those skills are worth, to their project, the monetary sum you estimate is worth your time
It’s a hard problem, made all the harder by the stakes — but it is not intractable.
