Friday, October 19, 2001

Ideal job offers more than dollars
Commentary by Jaime Walker

For students graduating in December, or even May, finding that ideal job after graduation is an even more daunting task today than it was one month ago. The American economy, which was booming when they entered school, isn’t slowing — it’s flatlining.

Add a national unemployment rate, teetering at 4.9 percent, to the fact that people aren’t shopping, aren’t e-trading and aren’t flying, and you have an equation for early graduate disaster. Finding that first job isn’t just an uphill battle against nagging parents and mounting bills. It’s now a battle waged against almost unbeatable odds.

If you’re one of the lucky ones, either a wise college professor, a parental sage or a career counselor has trained you to go to war with a stellar resume on fancy paper, a killer instinct for the company’s needs and a snazzy new outfit to impress your potential boss. But the average college student should claim victory if they manage to look beyond even meager dollar signs to the other important aspects of their first job offers.

It’s hard to say whether university officials nationwide are the ones doing undergraduate students a disservice or if the students themselves are to blame, but one fact is clear. Undergraduate students, on the whole, don’t have a clue what they should be looking for when they enter the job market.

Maybe it’s because we’ve never been trained what to look for in a job offer. Maybe it’s because we are too pre-occupied with the pre-graduation, job-finding frenzy to care.

But we should care.

In a recent Internet poll conducted by www.careerbuilder.com, one of the nation’s leading job search Web sites, 83 percent of those surveyed said when they graduated from college they were “not at all prepared for the job search process.”

Students nationwide spend an average of six years as undergraduate preparing for the real world.

The Consumer Credit Counseling Center reports that the average student crosses the stage on graduation day with more than $80,000 of loan and credit card debt. It’s no wonder an overwhelming 96 percent of recent graduates surveyed by Kaplan admitted salary was the single motivating factor they used when deciding to take their first jobs.

But money isn’t everything.

Our parents warn us we can’t shake the money tree after we shake hands with the chancellor and receive our diploma, but we often don’t fully understand the full impact of graduation until it’s too late.

We take jobs knowing we can make ends meet by eating Ramen noodles and only turning on the lights after the last bit of sunlight is gone.

We fear paying student loans, but we understand payments will be due. (Sometimes the anxiety is so great that we rush off to graduate school just to avoid the inevitable, but that is a separate issue.) Rather than have collection agencies knocking down our doors, we accept job offers hoping to fend off debts with pay stubs.

The reflex is understandable. We live in a capitalist society after all. But by counting the zeros in our paycheck, without regard for the rest of the deal, we do ourselves a disservice. We sign contracts to play Russian roulette.

We need to pay attention to benefits beyond salary. If we don’t we’re the ones who lose.

According to an Aetna Healthcare pamphlet, “young people between the ages of 20 and 30 are the most likely to need insurance but the least likely to have it.”

As students we take so much for granted. We think we are invincible. We never get sick. We don’t get injured. Our teeth are fine. Our bones are strong. If anything happens we’re on Daddy’s insurance anyway.

We haphazardly accept job offers if we think the money is right, without considering other essential benefits like insurance for our not so strong bones.

Hopefully we can enter the working world, not only prepared for economic challenges our generation will face in years to come, but also ready personally in the off chance that some unforeseen medical bill dwarfs even our latest MasterCard financial statement.

Jaime Walker is a senior news-editorial journalism major from Roswell, Ga. She can be contacted at (j.l.walker@student.tcu.edu).