The following was written by Tim Falkenberg, a friend of mine from Wheaton. He asked me if I would be willing to post this on my blog, since it fits thematically with some of what I've been writing the past few months. Another quintessential post-grad experience:
Currently I work two very different types of jobs: I intern for several companies, which is unpaid, and I do some part-time assistant work for one of those same companies, which is paid. Both of these jobs have their good and bad parts, but there’s a very interesting, and at times depressing, difference between the two in terms of what I do.
My intern work consists mostly of doing script coverage, which means I read film scripts that have been submitted to the company and write something in between a book report and a review of the script. Depending on the company, this is used for a couple of different things, but in the office where I also do assistant work it’s part of what my boss uses to give clients feedback as to what’s working and what isn’t. And that’s pretty gratifying. I’ve heard my boss on the phone before basically reading some of my comments to a client.
There are some truly awful scripts out there, but by and large coverage is pretty enjoyable for someone who likes to read, write, and discuss storytelling (like me). It’s intellectually stimulating work on a subject I enjoy that has tangible effects on projects in development (I’ve gotten to read a couple scripts that were revised after my first pass on them), and it directly relates to my college major to boot. Script coverage is grunt work, sure, but there’s far worse grunt work to be had out there.
As an assistant, on the other hand, my primary duties frequently involving such complex tasks as sorting things and sticking stickers. Now to be totally fair, I’m about the third person down the assistant ladder in a fairly small office, so my job is mostly facilitating the work of other assistants. All the same, probably 70% of the work I’ve been paid for is for using skills I’d mastered by the end of elementary school. I’m not sure 10-year-old me would have been able to do the whole job, but he certainly would have been plenty capable of filing documents and sticking stamps on envelopes. Heck, 10-year-old me wasn’t bad at answering the phone.
So when I write on my resume, “Implemented new filing system,” that sounds pretty good. But it’s also pretty depressing because I know what I really did was make numbered folders and put documents with corresponding numbers in them. I start wondering what use my college education is when companies seem more willing to pay me to print and stick mailing labels than to employ the creative and analytical capacities honed through my higher education.
I remind myself, of course, that any potential for upwards mobility requires a good education. It’s not even that I hate the assistant work, or that I think myself above it. I work in the entertainment industry; if you’re not willing to start at the bottom, there’s a good chance you’ll go broke and bomb out even if you are relatively talented. But when I think about what is required of me to hold a paying job versus what it takes to do a decent job on an unpaid internship, it does feel pretty backwards.
Such is the life of a post-grad.
(You can find Tim's blog here: http://timandhisthoughts.wordpress.com)
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