Career minded

Half the people I know are MIA for the summer, having fallen victim to the internship gods who demand loud and clear that it doesn’t matter what you’re doing in that power suit as long as it’s something. As near as I can tell, all one truly needs is a jaded internship coordinator who’ll verify your having worked with company-X for X-number of weeks and you’ll be right in line with the rest of college career hopefuls. \nYou’d better not question that wisdom, either! If you haven’t interned with Goldman-Sachs by the time you’re drinking legally you run the risk of dying a terrible death in the streets, brought on by some conjunction of starvation, race riots and bubonic plague. \nIn fact, don’t question anything at all, just cling tight to the commonly held, recently evolved notion of “building that resume.” Internships previously connoted overachievement, but they are now the new de facto status quo. A 2006 survey by job search Web site www.vault.com found 84 percent of college students intern prior to graduation – a clear instantiation of the “over-preparedness” movement that’s hitting the job market upon leaving academia. The medical field, for example, is at the forefront of academic sectors that have become so competitive that postdoctoral work is becoming the norm when judging who excels and who falls behind. \nGranted, med school is a ways off, but for the time we’re just idiot, 20-something college kids who would rather not use words like “accountability” or “flex-time.” So it’s strange to see us reconcile our avid workaholism.\nI’m an interesting hybrid: I get many a-double take when I announce I’m majoring in both philosophy and economics. My econ friends, sporting polo shirts and watching Jim Cramer’s Mad Money, shake their heads, as do their Birkenstock-wearing philosophy counterparts.\nAnd yet, while I’m well-aware metaphorical bubonic plague won’t catch up to me in my sleep if I’m not power-suit-employed in a year, I still rank right up there in willingness to deal with internships and jump through hoops for years on end in order to secure a good job later in life. In fact, I fully plan on using all next summer to do exactly that. But with all external forces pushing us toward this preparedness template, we have to understand what’s really going on if we’re to stay happy through it all. \nI have no idea what I want to do with my career, but I know spending a summer filing charts of economic analysis and bringing my “Office Space” Lumbergh-equivalent coffee every morning will certainly boost my chances of enjoying whatever job I eventually secure. The point is, we’ve at least got to be aware of the dichotomy that separates the “I have to do this” from the “I want to do this.” \nIt’s important to be happy, but I am absolutely advocating mindless interning. We might as well. There’s nothing bad that can come of covering one’s bases, even if the extreme cases reduce to nothing but “I came, I saw, I slapped it on a resume.” \nJust don’t forget to do what you like in the meantime. Or, in symbolic terms: hold on to your Birkenstocks.