Underemployed and begging to differ

"Job Climate for the Class of 2008 Is a Bit Warmer Than Expected"

So writes the NYTimes today, as I spend my entire day scouring the internet for jobs that are more and more outside the realm of ideal.

Walking from the graduation ceremony, I heard one of my classmates fathers giving her a hard time about not having a job. "Dad, lots of people don't have jobs."

I felt bad, I knew how she felt. "I don't have a job yet," I told her so her dad could hear. "Me neither," chimed in two friends I was standing with. "See?" she snapped at him and we all felt better for a moment.

The first week post-graduation feels like a breakup. The sort where you still love each other but its best for you both if you move on. Somehow though, I feel like Vassar is not lamenting the way I am.

It's fitting then, that job searching is eerily similar to firing up match.com. You adjust your personality to fit the person on the other end (or the business, as it were), you act overly enthused about things you know next to nothing about, you agree to eat at a thai restaurant when you hate it (here think: entertaining the possibility of moving 500 miles away or lowering your pay standards $10,000).

"The graduates who are struggling to find work now typically earned degrees from less prestigious institutions and were not the top students.

'A poor economy magnifies the differences between student groups,” said Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard. “Those graduating from spectacular schools with spectacular grades will continue to do well, while those in the middle and lower end will have a much harder time finding jobs and will be offered much lower salaries.' "

Hrmm... if you say so...

Rachel Ray's hipster (keffiyeh?) scarf

Exhibit A: A still photo of Rachael Ray, taken from a recent Dunkin' Donuts Commercial. It looks as though she's about to object to something, or defend herself about something, doesn't it?

Dunkin' Donuts had to defend itself yesterday, taking this spot off the air. Why? Ray's scarf.

Now, if you're a Vassarian, I know what you are thinking about that scarf:

"That looks like that hipster scarf that I always

see _____ wearing when they sit smoking outside the library..."

I think for many, now, that is one of the primary associations for the scarf, also known as a keffiyeh. Traditionally, the keffiyeh is a headdress worn by Arab men. Right-wing conservatives were quick to point out that the scarf is a symbol of Palestinian nationalism, popularized by Yasser Arafat.

Pro-Jewish blogger Pam Geller wildly called the scarf "part of a cultural jihad."

I wonder how many 20-somethings wearing the scarf on a daily basis at liberal arts colleges and in neighborhoods in Brooklyn (with large jewish populations no less) actually realize any authentic symbolism tied to the piece of

cloth.

You'll see on the left, that even Newsweek's magazine Current includes the keffiyeh as one of the essential accessories to hipsterdom, as a sidebar to Molly Finkelstein's article on the subject.

The entire situation lead me to think about where we draw the line between fashion and the symbolic. Incorporating a piece of cloth with symbolic meanings in Palestine and voiding it of its symbolic significance - or at least rending its significance irrelevant to the modster wearers - is an unsurprising move for our generation.

Post-modernism (yes, I'm sorry, I'm going to bring in the P word...) allows gen. Y to effectively ignore symbolic ties to previous eras: a scarf can be propaganda and fashion, or neither, or one, at any time.

We get away with a lot under the guise of irony and mimicry. There are lines we draw, parameters we do not cross, though they are becoming fuzzied. On MTV's reality show The Paper, which we Misc-ers watch with pitiful relish, one of the students was wearing an Israeli Defense Force t-shirt, one I've seen VC students wear on occasion as well. Che Guevera t-shirts are more ubiquitous than Chuck Taylors.

I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong here, but I think it is true that we often do not give enough consideration to what we're wearing and why.

It's possible that's what upset some about Ray's scarf, they wish she would just think (or that her stylist would think for her). Wear what you want, but wear it with some sort of consciousness? Maybe that's the moral.

Brooklyn school and American hypocrisy

Kathryn sent me this really interesting and in many ways disturbing NYTimes story about a NYC educator, Debbie Almontaser, who was recently more or less forced to step down from her position of principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy public school in Brooklyn.

Almontaser has been accused of being unamerican and using the Academy to indoctrinate students with a jihadist agenda. The situation with Almontaser have clearly brought out the worst in post-9/11 fear-mongering, anti-Islamic sentiment and highlights the increasing marginalization of an entire section of the American population.

I've had several conversations with friends in the past about how ridiculous it is for countries such as Italy to refuse building mosques and France for keeping Muslim women from wearing head scarves. What this story demonstrates is that the ideal of America as land of the free is an arrogant fallacy. Buildings, clothing and languages don't cause fear, violence or terrorism - If anything, misunderstanding, liminality and the limitation of an entire culture and religion do.

A commenter on the story added this quote from Abe Lincoln that is particularly salient, I think:

"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.As a nation we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are createdequal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotismcan be taken pure, and without the base alloy hypocrisy."

The Walker Family spotted by the NYTimes

This info is all Claudia, who was browsing the Times style page and came upon a photo slide show with audio.



The Walker Family was in the city to watch the Scottish Day parade. For those unfamiliar with Vassar culture, the Walker family, comprised of Jeff and Kathy Walker and their seven children (the two eldest are Vassar students), plays traditional dances and contra dances on campus and around the North East.



The Times' Bill Cunningham's breathy voice describes: "You'll see a group, I couldn't believe my eyes.. they looked like they stepped out of Brigadoon and it was just to watch the parade"

Parents Weekend, seen from the library windows

Down to forty-three days until May 25th, graduation day and it's Parents Weekend. Parents weekend is by and large a day of events for underclassmen parents, creating a strange juxtoposition for seniors as we sit holed up in the library finishing our theses.

Parents come and freshmen students show them around--this is the library, this is my dorm room, this is the english department; the underlying message is: this is Vassar, this is my home. For me (and if I can speak for other seniors, for us) it's a indisputable reminder that Vassar will not be my home for very much longer. This realization, a mild existential crisis, inspires a feeling akin to panic as I watch skinny shirtless boys tossing frisbees on Joss Beach from the Reading Room.

I know it's not quite time for sad sentimentality (give it another 20 days), but I can't help but wonder, did I cherish it enough?

Switching from a backward glance to a forward-focused one, yesterday my mom and I had a "check-in" about my plans for next year. I didn't get into the grad school programs I wanted, much to my own and others surprise (I say this only in a impotent attempt repair my broken ego..) I've applied for some jobs but no word yet; A response about the English Teaching Assistantship Fulbright in Italy is still looming.

Last week I was contacted by a popular national magazine company about applying to a fellowship program in D.C. It was one of those moments where it seems like its all coming together, like "yes, this is finally it, this is what its going to be."

And while, yes, it's possible that it may just be "the one," to be punny, this is also roughly the 10th time in 6 months that I've thought a potential path for the future was THE path. Basically I fall in love too fast and then am rejected, except here I'm talking about employers, not boys. I can't afford to be let down again, I'm just too cut up over the last 20 applications that took 10 hours to complete. I can't take another let down after being forced to distill my existence into a 250 word essay about why I'm so fabulous.

I wish I could rewind not four years, but about 4 or 5 months--back to a time where possibility was still endless in my mind and unfettered by the obvious reality that the Associated Press is not going to hire me in June. Those were the golden days. That though my Vassar degree will indeed take me somewhere some day, it's not going to be in forty-five days, but over the course of years. And its fine, really.

My mom suggested we have a little family party back in Syracuse after I'm done. All I could imagine when she said this was me, sitting at a picnic table holding my gold-leaf imprinted degree and being asked over and over and over again the question dreaded by all of the Class of 2008 around the world: "So what are your plans for next year?"

I wake up in a cold sweat from nightmares about that question. I think there's a special circle in Dante's Inferno reserved for sadistic adults who enjoy asking unsuspecting graduates that question--somewhere between gluttony and lust. Mostly because above all else, I'm constantly asking myself that question, and am as thirsty for an answer to it and as much without it as Statius in Purgatorio.

Reasons to choose Svedka?

I learn the greatest things from foreign coverage of the US. The following is top news on corriere.it, the website of Corriere della Sera: "The Absolut Vodka Initiative."

Apparently Absolut is running a new ad campaign in Mexico utilizing a map from the 1800s, which shows a large portion of now-U.S. lands were then Mexican territories. The ad text reads "In an Absolut world." Probably not going to go over as well in the states...

The LA Times blog La Plaza has it here.

On a side note, though, I discovered this while I was messing around with Google Reader. I think Google Reader just changed my life, no joke. Do other people know about this already and I'm late on the scene?

I want to post about the David McCullough lecture from Saturday night, but tomorrow. Maybe. Hopefully.

Who doesn't get into Harvard?

Um, roughly 93% of applicants, apparently.

A New York Times article reported on Tuesday that elite colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Dartmouth have admitted miniscule percentages of their applicants for entry into the class of 2012. The article states that, clearly, a number of factors has contributed to the lows, including the expansion of financial aid packages, the increase in number of high school graduates and availability of online applications.

There was a pretty funny and pointed satirical letter written as well, addressing the issue of legacy students, which I'm sure make up some not at all nominal percentage of the shockingly low 7.1% of Harvard students admitted this year.

"At Harvard, as at Yale, the applicant pool included an extraordinary number of academically gifted students. More than 2,500 of Harvard’s 27,462 applicants scored a perfect 800 on the SAT critical reading test, and 3,300 had 800 scores on the SAT math exam. More than 3,300 were ranked first in their high school class," the article states.

While of course the perfect score students are probably also gifted in other ways, I'm completely unconvinced that being first in your class or having a 1600 is really an indicator of anything much when it comes to the academic world. These are just number games.

I couldn't help but think back, though, to an old article from about a year ago (glad that my brain is filled with past newspaper articles and not other useful information) "Young, Gifted, and Not Getting into Harvard," in which an Alumni interviewer talked about his experience with Harvard rejects.

"What kind of kid doesn’t get into Harvard?," Michael Winerip writes, "Well, there was the charming boy I interviewed with 1560 SATs. He did cancer research in the summer; played two instruments in three orchestras; and composed his own music. He redid the computer system for his student paper, loved to cook and was writing his own cookbook. One of his specialties was snapper poached in tea and served with noodle cake."

Vassar's acceptance rate dropped significantly this year as well, something the Misc will be covering.