Every 20-something college student you meet will *without fail* either ask your major, or where you work within moments of meeting you, and — again — *without fail* my heart sinks and I’m filled with a sense of dread, already rehearsing the explanations that I’ll inevitably feel the need to trip over myself to provide when I confess that I’m just a retail manager. Despite the fact that I’m proud of how far I’ve come in the time I’ve been in retail and the endless hours of overtime I know I’ve put in to get ahead and advance, I can’t help but feel like an imposter within groups of my classmates or friends that appear to be farther along the road of success than I am.
Before the words have even left my mouth, I can feel the disdain for and the delegitimization of the work that I do, all too often being met with judgemental remarks and scoffs.
“But when will you find something real to do?”
“You’re smart, why do you waste your time there?”
“But how will you ever make it in your field if you spend college working retail?”
However, the longer I’ve worked, the less I’m willing to contribute to this perception of myself and students in similar positions. It’s time to speak frankly about the realities of being an average, American college student in 2020, the inherent classism in the all-too-common unpaid internship model and the roles that we all play in allowing this way of thinking to continue.
It’s time to stop being ashamed of simply not having the luxury of foregoing a paycheck, and start pushing the shame off onto the people who have made you feel less-than for having unavoidable expenses or who have allowed this feudalist model to continue to be the norm in many industries.
Higher education was not initially intended to be accessible to working-class families, but rather to further the socio-economic gap and allow (primarily white) wealthy families to continue to dominate many fields while their blue-collar counterparts continued to sink further and further into poverty; the concept of “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” and improving your status became a relic of a bygone era. Even as access to higher education has become more and more readily available, it has not served to become the great equalizer that it was thought to be.
Far too many pillars of life as an American university student remain incredibly elitist and classist, purposely closing themselves off to low income and minority students in both very overt and extremely subtle ways. From fraternity and sorority dues to buying textbooks and attempting to get a student loan in the first place, we’re wrapped up in a system that’s meant to be overly complex, exclusionary and exorbitantly priced.
To put it simply, I — and many other students — didn’t choose not to begin working in my field while earning my degree, but rather, there was never a choice to begin with.
While it may be more difficult for working students to get their foot in the door of workplaces post-graduation, it’s not due to lack of work ethic or wasted time while in undergrad. In many cases, it’s the exact opposite situation.
Speaking from experience, there have been many weeks where I’ve worked 40 hours or spent my time after class and all weekend rushing between jobs while still balancing a full course load worth of homework and readings along with responsibilities in the organizations on campus I work with. Building in my hour-long commute to and from the Fairfax campus, there often were barely enough hours in the day to finish what absolutely needed to be done — let alone work ahead or fit in extra studying time. I was always the first person to have to bow out of plans with my friends, either because I was scheduled to work, behind on classwork, or simply too emotionally and physically drained to want to do much of anything but sit in silence for a day.
But despite it all, I wouldn’t change a thing.
Through my time in retail, I’ve grown from an 18-year-old who had big dreams, big things to say and big things she was ready to do but none of the confidence and self-assuredness to do it, to a 20-year-old who knows her worth and refuses to be intimidated by anyone or anything. Finding my voice, my ability to advocate for myself and my professionalism didn’t take place inside an office, but nonetheless, I will not allow anyone’s perceptions and preconceived notions to take it away from me.
Service industry jobs are more than folding shirts and making change, they’re project management, professional communication, team leadership, staff development and elevator pitches. While it took a more unconventional form of inventory liquidations, drunk customers on the sales floor and angry parents throwing merchandise, I’m — finally — proud of the blood, sweat, tears and overtime hours that went into it.
I would be remiss to go without mentioning the fact that I am in an incredibly privileged position in more ways than I can possibly articulate. While I pay for my own college and some of my own expenses, I still have parents who have been both able to and willing to cosign on my student loans and provide me with more financial support than I can ever comprehend in order to enable me to attend college and major in something I’m incredibly passionate about. Simply having parents with the credit history to help with your student loans is a luxury that far too many of us — myself included — take for granted, considering most students will have little to no credit when entering their first semester of college. To be frank: I have it very easy, and that’s the problem with the system we’ve created.
The fact that in 2020 we allow our children to bury themselves in debt (with some of the worst interest rates to boot) before they know what that will really mean for their future and then point and laugh while they pick up the pieces is something we should all be ashamed of. It keeps me up at night knowing that for generations, we’ve closed the door to higher education on low income and minority students by letting both private and public colleges balloon tuition costs far beyond the scope of inflation or increased operating costs and have built a mentality around success and professional development that prizes largely-unpaid internships above all else to further alienate those who manage to sneak in through the cracks. It’s classist, it’s elitist, it’s outdated and it has no place in the America I would like to call home.
To everyone about to clock into their late-night shifts or head to bed in preparation for that early morning start: I hear you, I see you and most of all: I’m proud of you. I’m proud of the sleepless nights, the debt you’ve worked hard to get ahead of and everything that you’re going to achieve when you’re done. You’re not behind the curve, but rather forging a new path for yourself and doing the impossible. Keep your head up and let’s go get that bread, collegiettes.