Social Experiment: The College Bum

by Knownotknow

I went to check the mail today. All we received was an ad that asked for donations to our local food-bank. It reminded me that it had been a month since my last visit to the food bank and so we were eligible to get a food box. My wife works full-time as a cashier, but it’s not nearly enough to pay the bills.

I’m an English-Writing Major living in a college town. I had an on-campus job during the school year, but that ended for the summer, so I’m left to find a summer job.

The problem you face as a student in a college town is that it’s very difficult to find a job. Under “normal” circumstances it’s not impossible, but difficult. My circumstances are not “normal.”

I’m a non-traditional student. When I’m on the job hunt, I’m competing with dudes who are younger, much hardier and can survive on much less sleep than me. This has an impact on my job search as well. The fact that the majority of the job seekers out there fall into that category than into mine means for me that there are a lot more desirable choices for companies to hire than me. Chances are, I’ll be the only thirty-something college student applying for the same job that 20 other 20-something’s are applying for.

So, my already difficult task of finding a job is multiplied by a great deal. Let’s not fail to mention that the reason I’m in school at an advanced age (as compared to the majority of my classmates), is because I’m switching careers.

I must interject a little of my own history here. I had a career in the IT/IS industry for a decade or more. I had jobs in hardware, as well as software. It all happened so fast, that I didn’t have time to go to school. I was self taught and had a knack for all things at the other end of the keyboard.

The problem is, our society punishes you for doing anything that is outside the mainstream way of doing things. If you don’t have a degree, you make half what someone with the same job makes - even if they have less real experience. This punishment may not be intentional, but it is there. In my last job as a Software Engineer, a position that typically pays upwards of $50k annually, I made less than $30k.

It seemed to be a cap as well. There wasn’t much of a chance I was going to make any more than that. Those with degrees got the good paying jobs at companies that would not dream of hiring someone without a degree, regardless of experience. In fact, that lack of a piece of paper prevents a guy from even applying for the job on some job-search websites. So, choices are limited for those of us who are self-learned in a particular field. And you have to wonder who (in our society, anyway) will hire someone under those conditions. These companies are willing to pay half the deserved salary and demand twice the work. Why? They know that they can!

I was desperate for a job in web development (because I was very good at it), and landed that last job at a company who offered to hire me for $25k a year (generous, since I didn’t have the proper schooling for the job). I was promised raises with every programming language I learned and before I knew it, I’d be making the big bucks. Long story short, In 3 years, I received two raises and a promotion. The promotion did not come with a raise, just a different, more prestigious, job title.

All the while, the dude pouring these lavish gifts upon me – gifts that amounted to nowhere near what I should have been making – was buying new cars, ATVs and other toys galore. He was obviously getting more money.

The company was going through a year-long buy-out, which ended with no job loss (except for one).When asked why his employees weren’t doing better each January, he used the excuse that the buy-off was the cause. We all knew that he was given X number of dollars to distribute amongst his employees as raises annually. But he seemed to be the only one receiving significant salary increases.

Long story short, I decided to get a degree and just get out of there. I was being taken advantage of and deserved better. The problem was, now I was older and would have to go back to school as a non-traditional student, which brings us back to the topic at hand: finding a summer job.

Not only is it difficult for me to find a good summer job, for the reasons listed at the beginning of this article, but also because I am “over-qualified.” Pizza Hut won’t even look at my application because I made half what I should have, but a lot more than Pizza Hut could pay me. Those young twenty-something’s I’m competing with didn’t make anywhere near $30k at their last job, so will expect far less (at least I think that’s the reasoning behind the “over-qualified” argument). I might do ok if I applied for a management position, but who wants to hire a summer manager?

Considering all of this, my rock is my unhirability and my hard place is my need to pay the angry bill collectors. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m in the place of my own doing. I didn’t play by the rules. I tried to cut corners and fast track it to success and failed. That’s why I’m here.

Another way of looking at it is that I’m not willing to stab people in the back. I don’t want to be a multi-millionaire. To me, the American Dream is equivalent to comfort, not fast cars, big houses and vacation timeshares on some tropical beach on an island no-one has ever heard of. I’d like to have an efficient clean car and maybe some solar panels on my modest house with a front and back yard. I’d like to have the ability to help others, because I remember how much of a struggle life in the U.S. can be for some of us.

So what is my solution? Well, I suppose I’ll keep putting applications out there. If I can get an interview, I know I can get the job. As a last-gasp effort I thought I would try this article, as a social experiment.

I have to believe that there are still people in this great nation that believe in the simple American Dream I outlined above. I have to believe that there are people willing to offer a hand to someone in need. My hope is dwindling in the inhuman processes associated with making a go of it here in the Good Ol’ U.S. of A.

So, I’m selling my Hope… for $5.00USD. Here’s how it works. You purchase my Hope and you receive two things. First, and least important, is a handwritten thank you card from me personally (I hate hand-writing any cards, so know that this part is work for me). Second, and more importantly, you receive my Hope. Give me your email address and I’ll send out an email, at least once a month, telling of my progress. I believe that Hope is one of those things that increases as you give it away.

The $5.00 you send me really only provides the function of helping me pay my bills. The story of the entire experiment is really what you and I are trying to build. If it is not successful, then you probably will never even know I existed and this will have been a huge waste of time: time I suppose I could have spent filling out more Hope-sucking job applications for jobs that are never going to hire me.

If it is successful, then we will all be able to tell our friends and families stories about how awesome this country still is. How one man’s desperate cry for help did not go unheeded and strangers opted to buy-in to just a little Hope. You’ll have real-life stories of my endeavors to succeed as a non-traditional college student and my push to live this American Dream to share with your friends.

There’s a part of me that screams of the dangers of putting myself out there on this level; that this will be a great way to lose all hope and faith in humanity and the American Dream. But at this point, there is a bigger part of me that refuses to believe that this type of experiment could ever fail in one of the richest countries in the world: a country built upon the very idea of brotherhood and community. And then I think that if I had the means to send $5.00 to someone who wrote an article like this, it’d be worth it just to see what happens. It’d be worth it to see if enough people joined in to help this weird dude out.

What’s $5.00?

What’s $5.00 for a little Hope?