The Titular Post

Late April, 2012.

Oh, hi, writing. I haven’t seen you in the past two years unless it’s been in the form of a policy memo, brief, concise, and heavily cited. Before then we hung out when I was listing all my dead cats and being offensive to Japan. Things have changed since we’ve spoken last. I’m finishing up a Master’s degree in do-goodery and heading into unemployment where I’ll do no good at all.

Well, you certainly don’t have to do good with a degree in public policy. When I signed up I guess I thought that an MPP was the generic degree you get when you want to work for social justice, advance the common good and all that and your bachelor’s degree isn’t cutting it. Really, it’s more for people who want to be social science researchers, budget/financial wonks, or work in politics. Many of them will work for social justice and the common good, but they’ll do it in a quantitative-heavy, highly technical kind of way. I learned enough to do well in my classes, but me running regressions is like a fish climbing a tree. I’m good at school, not regression, and nobody hires you for being good at school.

I think I made the wrong decision.

I had been unemployed or underemployed for nearly a year before entering school, and I hadn’t been aiming high. The only job I arguably turned down was as a parking garage attendant, and that was really just me not following up after a request for more information. You see, I got that e-mail the same day I was accepted to law school, and I guess I was feeling a little too fancy to work in a parking garage. I didn’t find any other work for months after that, so I ended up kicking myself for not following up about the parking garage. Anyway, I had decided a few months into unemployment that I needed to go to grad school as soon as possible to get the hell out of the labor market. It was before I even had sufficient work experience to know what I wanted to do, only what I didn’t. I didn’t think I wanted to be a teacher (been there, done that), but I wanted to use whatever skills I had to work for the common good. I’d applied to tons of AmeriCorps positions that year and only got one interview.


At this point I feel that I should clarify, for what it’s worth, I’m not a total failure of a human. I’m smart, went to a good college, and know how to work hard. I have a decent resume with cool internships and some paying stuff too. It’s just been exponentially more difficult to get hired for the paying stuff. Even when you’re only being paid an $11,000 a year “living allowance” for full-time hours.

So I didn’t have the luxury of an AmeriCorps stipend and a place in a nonprofit to figure out what I want to do with my life. I had to just blindly pick, and I ended up with policy school or law school. As an insecure overachiever, I was the key demographic for law school. But luckily, several lawyers talked me out of going. Dodged a bullet there. Am left with this knife wound of policy school. Not quite as much debt as law school, more versatile of degree, but still job prospects aren’t great. And the biggest problem is me. I’m the problem. My quant skills suck, I didn’t specialize enough in anything to be impressive, and I can’t network my way out of a paper bag. Increasingly, I think the only way people get jobs is through networking, and that’s a world that’s just unavailable to me. I’m smart and a good employee, I swear! I just can’t chitchat with strangers without a script.

I decided to write this while tearing up on the bus, shortly after having been rejected from a job that only required an associate’s degree, thinking about what a mistake my education has been. In just three weeks, I’ll have the degree in my hand and it will be worth nothing. But when asked where I’d be if it weren’t for grad school, the answer, sometimes spoken and sometimes not, is probably dead. Now that it’s almost over and in a few weeks I’ll be newly credentialed, I don’t know where I’ll be.


At least I didn’t go to law school.