Career hunts are putting people on edge this year—and for a good reason.
While many graduates and younger college students are worrying about coming back to school, many of us also worry about what the pandemic will do to the job market. I’ve heard students contemplating gap years and graduate degrees to avoid the job hunt and right now, the job market feels like a cartoonishly huge, looming question mark.
For some, there’s a silver lining in the changes brought on by the pandemic. My roommate, a reclusive CS major, loves staying in all the time. She’s delighted that she doesn’t have to interact with people, instead chugging away at her code. For her, it’s not that different from a work-from-home job she might have in the future.
But for many majors *cough, liberal arts* a lot is lost through the internet.
Let me also point out the painfully obvious; there are students who live in low-income and underfunded areas that don’t get good wi-fi. Some don’t have their own computers or workspaces. But there’s another disparity that the pandemic exacerbates—the relationship between soft skills and work tasks is lost on techies, especially on those in (male-dominated) STEM fields. Tweet after tweet shows that most of us are stuck at home, sitting through Zoom meetings that could have been emails.
But as my roommate and I talk about the job market and work, I find that we are worried about different things. I’m worried about securing a job that can pay my bills without nepotism or a robust networking list and she’s worried that staying in all the time will eventually hurt her physical and mental health. While she likes coding all day, she notes that it really isn’t the same as it was in person, and I get the sense that we’re both questioning how our majors and career paths will turn out.
Maybe this pandemic will allow us to appreciate each other’s fields, noting that we both bring different things to a company’s table.