Workin' the Job

Like many students at Columbia, I blame all of my problems on failures of the school, and, in this year's Fail-a-Thon, the biggest donor is poor career counseling. Sure, we had that financial aid director who stole from us, and those Republicans who kicked people's heads, but those of us who struggled to find summer jobs know that we have forgotten old problems in favor of current ones. Columbia's inability to prepare us for the job market goes right to the heart of the school, and we must drive the stake of change through it.

The first rule of Columbia career services is that they only offer jobs in the finance industry. This is reflected in the Center for Career Education motto: "Now offering jobs only in the finance industry." It is admittedly a lucrative career chøice. The problem is that only soulless shells of men enter it. You can't even pretend you're benefiting anyone with a job that basically consists of moving money around until some of it spills onto your pants. Many of us at Columbia do not want to spend our evenings scraping crusty money off our clothes, but when we remove "finance" from our Monster.com searches, we're left with suspicious unpaid internships at Internet startups.

Whether you work for Morgan Stanley or eScam, however, the application process is more or less the same. Job postings may seem different from one industry to another, but the listed requirements are mainly fake anyway. Companies only value two skills: one, the ability to apply for things way in advance, and two, the ability to know someone who once worked at the company. Both are crucial. You may seem to have all the qualifications of, say, an excellent industrial chemistry intern, but if you can't even send in an application in December, your knowledge of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene is probably just a lie. Likewise, you may have received excellent grades from dozens of respected professors, but how can an HR director know if you're talented if you aren't friends with Rick the sales intern? GPA, extracurriculars, and a cover letter are only important in the sense that you need to have them. Otherwise, the important things are being first in line and knowing someone who will help you cut.

Unfortunately, we don't learn either of those skills in the classroom. You know how rock musicians are always claiming that they learned more from a three-minute record than they ever could in school? It's kind of like that, except business lessons don't teach that women leave you and drugs are awesome. When you think back on all the crap you learn in grad school, you'll realize it's a wonder the antithetical nature of business and academic knowledge allows you to think at all.

With that in mind, I propose a few radical changes to the Core. First, we should get rid of University Writing, which everyone hates anyway. Job postings always ask for "excellent verbal/written communication skills", but they don't mean they want you to be able to express yourself well. In the business world, stating things clearly is a great way to get sued; it's a lot easier to find loopholes in old promises if they never made sense in the first place. Instead, we should have University Plagiarism, in which we would learn to take credit for the ideas of others by stating them so poorly that the original authors would be too ashamed to claim them. We could write, for example, "Commonly accepted naming practices dictate that you address me according to my preference of either A) last name, with proper title, or B) given name, in this case Ishmael." Got anything to say about that, Melville? Didn't think so.

We also need to trim CC of the philosophers whose ideas are contrary to good business practice. This will leave us with Machiavelli. We can also add the business classic What Color Is Your Parachute?, which, since it is neither colorful nor about parachutes, is right in line with the University Plagiarism ethos. At the end of the semester, the rich kids can buy essays off the Internet, and the poor kids can befriend them until they get close enough to steal their essays.

Classes with "humanities" in the title should be replaced with a two-part course. Part one will be called "Turn it in by December," and part two will be called "Meet Rick." The science requirement can stay the same, as can Major Cultures, which is basically the intellectual equivalent of affirmative action.

People who really want a quality liberal arts education often have screwed up priorities and wind up paying so much attention to classes that they forget to write self-aggrandizing cover letters until it's too late. Some of them don't even want to enter the business world and are willing to struggle through a few years of bad jobs to get to a professorship or artistic position. We can force them to succeed against their wills. With these changes, which will never happen, everyone at Columbia will have the necessary tools to snag America's top jobs.