Young and Educated in Europe, but Desperate for Jobs

Alba Méndez, a 24-year-old with a master’s degree in sociology, sprang out of bed nervously one recent morning, carefully put on makeup and styled her hair. Her thin hands trembled as she clutched her résumé on her way out of the tiny room where a friend allows her to stay rent free.

She had an interview that day for a job at a supermarket. It was nothing like the kind of professional career she thought she would have after finishing her education. But it was a rare flicker of opportunity after a series of temporary positions, applications that went nowhere and employers who increasingly demanded that young people work long, unpaid stretches just to be considered for something permanent.

Soon after her 23rd birthday four years ago, Melissa Abadía made a wrenching decision: She would leave her close-knit family in Spain, where the grinding fallout from the 2008 financial crisis had made securing a good job impossible, and move to the Netherlands, where employers were still hiring.

“When I got on the plane, I was crying,” Ms. Abadía, a bright, ebullient woman, recalled. “But I had to decide: Should I fight for something back home that makes no sense, or get out of there and make a life for myself?”

Despite five years of training in nursing in her hometown, Castellón de la Plana, in eastern Spain, she now works in a windowless stockroom in Amsterdam organizing purses, socks and other accessories at a clothing store.

LOL, you might get a kick out of this excerpt from (Note: Reader Barf Alert!).

The Socjournal, www.sociology.org, A refereed e-journal of scholarly research that makes an original contribution to the advancement of sociological knowledge.

Dr. Mike Sosteric, Associate Professor, Athabasca University, [http://www.sociology.org/what-is-sociology]:

Sociology is interested in the world that you have created.

Now, I don’t know about you, but for me, that makes sociology pretty special (in fact according to August Comte, sociology was the “king” of academic disciplines). The fact that sociology takes as its starting point what we have created (i.e., the social order) is what attracted me to sociology in the first place. Before I got into sociology, I had tried several disciplines. I tried engineering, chemistry, and took an extended jaunt into psychology but was never really excited by the materials as I was with sociology.

Now, I can’t remember my engineering or psychology classes, but I still remember my first year sociology course, taught by John Conway at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. Now here, I thought, was a discipline that explained things. In my first year I learned the leaders of sociology and the different “types” of sociology. I also learned many different explanations for things that I had always wondered about. I learned, for example, why I had such a bad experience in school as a child and why we (i.e., my single parent mom, my brother, and I) were always so poor. It was because of structured inequalities and social biases against single women (biases which still exist today). I also learned about social classes, racism, classism, capitalism, and communism. I learned about gender and socialization, social control, and a plethora of other fascinating sociological facts and theories. From the very first day, I was hooked. This is what I wanted to know about! I wanted to know about the world I had been plopped into and sociology provided that. Using the tools and methods provided by sociologists, I came to understand about the world we live in and how each individual creates it in our day-to-day acts of reinforcement.

Of course, this did not make me a very happy camper because as I learned, the world we live in is a very messed up place. We live in a world of ghastly contrasts. Hollywood stars and corporate moguls jetting around in private planes while 16,000 children a day starve to death. Women who, no matter how hard they try, often end up poor and alone while the husbands take home the pay cheque, pension, and a younger woman. The working classes who struggle to feed their family while the corporate executives grow fat on six figure salaries.

Power for some, hunger for others.

Privilege for a few, wage slavery (or literal slavery in the sweatshops and forced sex shops of the world) for the rest.

Yuck!

As sociologists revealed, it truly was a world of ghastly contrasts and the more I descended into the bowels of the discipline of sociology, the more I realized just how ghastly it all was. By the time I was done my degree, I saw there was very little that was pretty about our world. I was like the “Grim Traveller” from Bruce Cockburn’s song of the same name looking at the world and weeping at the suffering and the pain.

The problem isn’t that she majored in Sociology. It’s that she majored in something without having any sort of plan on how to use it.

I majored in Liberal Arts. My dad, who was an industrial management bachelors with an MBA MADE me perform due diligence in high school on getting a politics sci degree that he was going to help subsidize.

After a bit of research I told him the following: my preference was to go into policy analysis, but I was going to take a lot of political campaign management classes (emphasis in management) and could also pursue a law degree when I graduated even though that wasn’t my first option.

He was satisfied with that. I ended up futzing around with policy and campaigns for a couple years, but when I didn’t go anywhere I pivoted into an MBA ... Which turned out to have a LOT of commonality with the campaign management stuff.

This twit apparantly did nothing of the sort, simply choosing a major that interested her without knowing what she’d do with it.

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