Guilty pleasures

And I realized that by deferring my graduation, I jumped in to the student cohort paying £9,000 for their tuition fees – or more precisely, acquiring a whopping of debt £27,000. So how are these students different? Well, they do really seem to be much more engaged, wanting to get as much as possible out of their degree. They are involved in societies, this year there were 3 sociology people running for the Student Union Council positions, they queue for appointments with careers advisors, run around career fairs.  I would say that my previous year had a much more blasé attitude – when in a second year I shared my observance of the total lack of interest of my sociology classmates in internships, my third year friend just remarked: ‘Oh, don’t worry, in third year they will not be worried about jobs either.’

Is it right or wrong? I guess it more resembles the Czech take it easy culture when Master degree (or further education) is almost compulsory but it is not impossible to be engaged in a more or less serious job on the side.  It goes quite well with equating sociology and the difficulties of employment. Let me not count the times where I had to explain what sociology is and what I actually will do ‘after’. But I actually hope that we are unemployable because of what we know and learn, not because of what we don’t. In sociology, we study how things work in society, why they are the way they are. We are trained to give problems second look, understand them in depth and scrutinize them. As my friend once said, being a sociologist, every pleasure becomes a guilty pleasure. That’s our added value. We are the only social science, I dare to say with a pinch of salt, that actually aims at changing things. So what is happening now, when I am sitting in lectures with people applying for graduate jobs in Barclays, British Gas, market research and merchandising, if I am not generalising too much?

But why am I even surprised? Who with a £30,000 whole in a pocket would not want to find a job which essentially pays, at the end of the day? But isn’t sociology losing its premium value of ‘unemployability’? Or do we really believe that armed with all the knowledge about inequalities, Bauman’s theory of consumerism and liquid modernity, we will be the one making a difference in this industrial graduate scheme? I don’t know. We, sociologists are good at questioning social realities. Do you want some answers? Give me a grant, couple of months, a warm office, and I will research it for you.