Our American Meritocracy
The Daily emphasizes the importance of networking in finding post-college jobs. They quote job counselors and researchers who advise students to form connections in the fields they’re interested in, as positions these days tend to be unadvertised and handed out through “referrals and word of mouth.”
So how do students make these connections? Well, going by the examples of successful job searches in the story, there are two ways. Best of all, choose the right family to be born into. Almost as good is choosing a roommate who was born into the right family.
Does this mean Rebecca Ramsey will have trouble fidning a job? I worry because Rebecca’s column hasn’t been in the Daily lately. Seriously, back in the nineties, she would ahev been snapped up by some web page magazine just loike that.
posted by Lucky Jackson on March 3rd, 2004 at 12:27 pm ethats right, because who needs skills and talent when those don’t get you a job anymore?
posted by stephen santos on March 3rd, 2004 at 3:22 pm eI would agree that networking is a very critical element in finding good work - anyone who’s worked in consulting or applied to grad school can tell you that. But it’s puzzling that they would focus so much on what your family can do for you - are family members really that reliable as sources of employment for anyone not named Bush, Rockefeller, or Kennedy? There are definitely more helpful things you can tell undergrads in this regard - e.g., try to get professional internships during the summers so you have an in with a potential employer or at least a good letter of reference, try to get to know the professors in your major for the same reasons, take advantage of your alumni association, etc.
posted by Nick on March 3rd, 2004 at 3:58 pm ename the movie:
posted by Sara on March 3rd, 2004 at 11:04 pm e“Being a Fabin isn’t all that easy…I can certainly understand how the Kennedys feel.”
Waiting for Guffman — and I didn’t even cheat.
posted by Boris on March 4th, 2004 at 1:49 pm eLucky Jackson — I’ve been wondering about Ms Ramsey lately, too. I’m sure she’s going places, what with her writing skills and her fresh take on “Michigan hookups” and all things oral.
posted by Boris on March 4th, 2004 at 1:52 pm eMs. Ramsey is definitely going places:
posted by Brandon on March 4th, 2004 at 3:05 pm ehttp://www.michigandaily.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/03/04/4046d17d58a08
you need to enable trackback pings, and maybe even a geourl header so we can find your blog other than by hearsay.
as for slamming the daily, yeah it’s crap, but so is every other undergrad-run school paper i’ve ever read, including the cornell daily sun. and if you think ann arbor is overrated, you should try living in ithaca for a while. (crotchless sheep panties, by frederick’s of ithaca.)
don’t misunderstand me, there is nothing more i want than to get the fuck out of this self-indulgent burg.
posted by Dave on March 4th, 2004 at 8:54 pm eDoes this mean Rebecca Ramsey will have trouble fidning a job?
It didn’t say anything about engaging in Michigan hookups with people from the right families.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on March 4th, 2004 at 10:00 pm eSpeaking of the blowjob, anybody hear about the flap down in, what, Arizona, where the female columnist explained exactly what proper blowjobs entailed? (Lots of glans licking, apparently). It made Romensko’s News Is Free… (If I was more motivated, I’d track it down now…)
posted by js on March 5th, 2004 at 8:12 am ejs
I think Ms. Ramsey will have plenty of jobs lined up by the time she graduates. If not already.
posted by Nick on March 5th, 2004 at 9:01 am eRe: Dave’s comment about Ithaca - yes, there are surely places that suck worse than AA. Yet few of those places are as expensive to live in as AA, and most of them are a little more humble and graceful about their shortcomings. What’s sort of unique about AA is that it believes it’s the epicenter of Western culture and civilization, in spite of being a fairly mediocre town - this sometimes makes it seem worse than it actually is.
posted by Nick on March 5th, 2004 at 9:23 am ehttp://www.lumberjackonline.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/02/12/402ae3e9a3095?in_archive=1
posted by petunia on March 5th, 2004 at 11:07 am eJS, Found the article from the NAU Lumberjack
nick was all, “yes, there are surely places that suck worse than AA. Yet few of those places are as expensive to live in as AA, and most of them are a little more humble and graceful about their shortcomings…”
i got my doubts about these type of statements. like AAIO says he pays more here for rent than he did in boston. maybe he does, but i don’t think that in general rents here are higher than boston (the contrary) or ithaca, or basically a whole bunch of places all across the country. excluding small towns in north dakota.
newsflash: rents are high all over. not like when i was a young fella, went to san francisco one summer in 1985 and found a place for $110/month (my own room, but sharing an apt.) try that now you pay $900 or up. AA is dirt cheap compared to there, and in general every place is pricey now.
america is overrated is more like it.
as the the “overrated” part, or being “humble about shortcomings,” i don’t know where youse are getting your information. i’ve lived here six months and i miss NYC, and providence, and northampton, and i miss san francisco most of all, and get claustrophobic here, but i never heard AA “rated” by anyone from here (excluding AAIO himself). when i go downtown no one comes up to me saying “shucks, ain’t this burg the best?? yep sir, it sure is!!” they just walk along, staring at their shoes. no one ever said it was special. maybe i’m getting my news and opinions from different sources from y’all.
basically i don’t buy the whole AAIO gripe, not because i think AA is so great, but because it ain’t rated!
posted by mikey on March 5th, 2004 at 11:46 am eMikey, You must live in the Ann Arbor Observer no-deliver zone.
posted by Anna on March 5th, 2004 at 12:38 pm eI don’t even read the Observer and I feel like I hear or read how great AA is from at least 3 different sources each week.
Even if it weren’t an ongoing thing, the sales pitch I got about this town when deciding to come here definitely over-hyped the place’s amenities.
Regardless of whether or not AA is (over)rated, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: those of us who read/post here are dissatisfied and it clearly makes us feel better somehow to bitch about it. Don’t rain on our parade.
PS–I shared a 3 bedroom house with basement and backyard in Pittsburgh with one other person and we paid a total of $700 a month for the place. Within 2 blocks of an entire neighborhood of bars, restaurants, records stores, shops, cafes, etc. Last time I checked, Pittsburgh had a population of almost 10 times that of Ann Arbor. Hardly a small town in North Dakota.
posted by Alex on March 5th, 2004 at 3:16 pm eI can second the Pittsburgh thing. I had a huge, two-story apartment in Pittsburgh, big enough for a couple, with a dishwasher, washer/drier hook-up in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. This was now 9 years ago, but the year before that I paid $490/month for a crappy efficiency on S. Division in Ann Arbor. My rent in Pittsburgh? $375.
posted by Anna on March 5th, 2004 at 4:16 pm eMikey, not everywhere is nearly as expensive as Ann Arbor, San Francisco, Boston, Manhattan, etc… You don’t have to go to North Dakota to find what seem to be ridiculously-cheap rents. I have friends who pay $200 each for a really large 2-bedroom apartment above a bookstore in the heart of what I think is one of the best neighborhoods in Grand Rapids– Eastown (think Ypsi-ish, but perhaps a little livlier overall and lacking a good music scene). No, there isn’t a Starbucks on every corner, but there are a couple independent coffeehouses, including one open all night. I think the proximity of a storefront Starbucks is one good way to gauge how pricey rents in a neighborhood will be.
posted by Brandon on March 5th, 2004 at 8:41 pm eWell, I should probably throw in my 2c about Pittsburgh being a paradise of affordable housing and fun. I grew up, went to college, and worked there, and had more beautiful cheap apartments than I could dream of finding here - most recently was a $500/mo 1BR in Squirrel Hill (a very nice, very young neighborhood) with a large back patio opening directly onto a panorama of Frick Park (one of the city’s very lovely urban parks). And cost of living is more than just housing - having fun in AA seems atrociously expensive to me - I miss those $1 and 25c draft specials at bars in Pittsburgh - but perhaps I divulge too much about my college years.
A couple other places that exemplify what I’m talking about: 1) Portland, OR, a beautiful, exciting, friendly city where until very recently my friend lived in a large $350/mo 1BR with a view of the Willamette and the city skyline; 2) Chapel Hill, NC - although it’s getting more expensive (tho still not as bad as AA), being part of the NC Research Triangle means that the job opportunities you have there make it quite affordable, and cool people who move there to go to school have lots of incentive to stay. More generally, I guess, I don’t understand why it should be surprising that AA compares favorably to NYC or SF on cost of living - it’s easier to earn lots of money in places like those, and they offer more culturally and socially - what I don’t get is why AA is so much more expensive than places like Pittsburgh, Portland, or Chapel Hill, which still have more to offer.
As far as Brandon’s comment, I would agree that generally the presence of lots of coffeeshops and cafes means higher rents, but there’s more of a gradient relationship at work - in other words, one Starbucks doesn’t have to mean that your town is instantly consumed by $800/mo hovels like AA is - the 3 cities I’ve mentioned have many more Starbucks than here and, still, are cheaper.
posted by Nick on March 5th, 2004 at 11:09 pm eThe other thing is that you expect higher rent in larger cities (SF, NY, LA, Boston, whatever). Last time I checked Ann Arbor wasn’t necessarily a gigantic bustling metropolis on the coast. And, no, the coast of Canada doesn’t count.
posted by Sara on March 6th, 2004 at 7:45 am eAs a former Pittsburgher myself, isn’t part of the reason that the rent was so low there in comparison to AA was because the glut of housing? AA seems to have a low supply of housing and high demand for it. That would suggest to me that the rents would be higher than say, Pittsburgh, where they were over-capacitized.
posted by Carl on March 6th, 2004 at 10:56 am eCertainly doing things like constructing more housing and allowing “granny flats” would help bring our rents down. As I recall we’ve already had the discussions about why that will probably never happen.
posted by Nick on March 6th, 2004 at 11:54 am eAnd, come to think of it, it doesn’t explain why many other small college towns don’t have the same problem with affordable housing.
posted by Nick on March 6th, 2004 at 2:03 pm eHmmm, East Lansing had a perpetual housing shortage all the years I lived there.
In Ithaca when I was there, rents were roughly proportionate to altitude. To live all the way up East Hill at Cornell cost a fortune. The cheapest housing was literally downtown, which was the only place I could afford. That meant a punishing four hundred foot climb to get to class every day.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on March 7th, 2004 at 12:11 am eBut is the housing in Lansing as expensive as here? I was thinking about State College, PA, which is a fairly small place with a huge school, and I’ve never heard of it being anywhere near as expensive as AA. Chapel Hill is cheaper than AA, which is odd given that the presence of Research Triangle Park nearby creates additional housing demand above what the students bring - granted there’s a lot of building in Durham and Raleigh that offsets this, but CH is still the nicest part of the area to live in.
posted by Nick on March 7th, 2004 at 3:33 pm e