By Sarah Moomaw, News Staff
Welcome to Summer II.
All at once, resume files across campus open to be edited as the co-op cycle switches.
I don’t have to tell anyone reading this that it’s the resumes we graduate with, a direct result of the co-op program, that sets our university apart from others.
It’s also each individual item on our resumes – sometimes spilling onto a second page, no matter how hard we try to cut down – that allow many of us to have jobs lined up for the Monday following the commencement ceremonies at the TD Garden.
While many recent graduates fear post-college life, we’ve already had slices of it every six months while we were in school. The only mental block to overcome is that our 9-5 jobs are now long-term, without a university-set end date.
Taylor Cotter, a member of the Class of 2012 who graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in journalism, left the Garden with a future in sight. Two months later she’s comfortably living the “adult life.”
On top of her day job, she began blogging for Huffington Post last Tuesday; she wrote about her newly found life that became hers thanks to a full resume. Her piece took the Internet by storm, one with hail and a tornado.
In her piece, Cotter wondered where the seemingly glamorous freelance life she felt overly prepared for was. Those on the Internet (namely Gawker, the Huffington Post comment sections and Twitter) interpreted her article as a complaint that she didn’t get to experience the post-grad struggle.
I can sympathize with Cotter.
If come December, after finishing my final 16 credits, I find myself employed for January onward, I would have pitched the exact same editorial to the staff at The News.
Cotter completed two co-ops, numerous internships and held student leadership positions during her tenure at Northeastern, I’ve done the same and haven’t had a true break since the winter of 2010, before my second co-op.
My friends from beyond Huntington Avenue claim I’m the most employable person they know on paper (and hopefully in person).
Yet it seems Northeastern graduates are fighting for bottom of the totem pole positions. We are grateful for these positions, and wouldn’t give them up, but haven’t our professors and “real-world experience” prepared us for so much more?
The likelihood is that in our first job we will probably have fewer responsibilities than what we had on our second or third co-op. We are over prepared.
Maybe we’re naïve for having expected so much more from a piece of paper, but isn’t that why I, Cotter and the 7,000 students that participate in co-op each year chose Northeastern in the first place?
So, if the day comes where I’ve managed to skip the struggle for roughly the same position I’ve already held on co-op, I too will wonder if I should have tried struggling, fighting for a “better” job and making ends meet through freelancing.
