I am a graduate from a University.(5 years ago) I am sick of dead end jobs in Nova Scotia! I want to pay my bills, I want to live green. I want to make a difference! However I also need to eat. Forget about having kids or getting married. I don’t own anything but an old cell phone. Fun fact, When I was 16 I made $3.00 less then what I make now. (10 years later) Oh yeah and a $30,000 student loan!
Yeah, yeah I have lived out west. But where does that get me?
Working in an oil field, that’s where. Why do we need to choose between money, further devastation to the planet or plodding away at dead end jobs who pay minimum wage and ask that you own a car? Are you kidding? — Going back to school..
This article appears in Aug 15-21, 2013.
Sounds like you answered your own question.
I feel the same way ;_;
I’m a half decade older and here to tell you…
it doesn’t get any better.
university degree does not guarantee a job, happiness, a good job, happiness
student loans just about guarantee you unhappiness and anxiety. the bank or whoever provided that student loan is NOT YOUR FRIEND!
the bank offered my 18 yr old granddaughter a $40,000 student line of credit to be used HOWEVER SHE WANTED. and only 60$ a month payments until after school. oh god, oh god.
post secondary schools, universities are after your money. its a business. they don’t give two hoots about flooding the market with a glut of ‘management degrees’ that end up flipping burgers. you would be far better off working at a fast food place instead of going to university, getting business experience and working steadily up and outwards til you are running an international chain and driving a ferrari at 27.
some things like being a lawyer, doctor, archeologist, biologist. like that need university degrees to get employed.
What degree did you graduate with? Because if i hear anything remotely in the realm of BA, good luck.
I’m not being rude. I’m being a realist. If you go back to school and you don’t plan to specialize in medicine, technology or law, please do yourself a favour and go to a technical college. There is a 90% employment rate in an industry job that relates to the field of study within three months of graduation.
Because if you hold and english degree and return to pursue a philosophy degree or something equally asinine, you’re gonna have a bad time. A really bad time because you’ll just rack up more loans that you won’t be able to pay back.
Unless you plan to be a professor, teacher or are a serious genius, stay away from the arts if it’s money you’re seeking.
I did *costume studies* of all things. I was a dumb kid when I was finishing high school and I think it’s criminal that our government would agree to give a 17 year old a student loan for something like that.
i spent 30 grand on univerity and college to get a 42 thousand a year job. and im one of the lucky ones. Post secondary education is the biggest regret of my life if i had of stayed at mcdonalds i would now be a store manager making 90-120k a year (depending on how well the store did) with no student loans. People need to stop falling for the trap
Brandon though.. here’s the thing.
If you are looking to emigrate for whatever reason, most countries require you have a piece of paper of some kind.
Your experience counts for shit.
It’s a random thing but you never know if you’ll want or need to live in another country.
This is why i tell anyone who is ambitious that they really need to get a useful degree.
Nobody likes a reality check. The reaction to my previous comment is an indication of that. Nobody likes to hear the truth unless it’s a nice, happy truth. Other realists get it but people who are emotionally driven and make choices based on how they feel will often react harshly to the truth BUT FOR YOUR OWN GOOD OP, YOU NEED TO SERIOUSLY LISTEN UP HERE.
The truth is (and you can google this, look at statistics, whatever…) most degrees don’t give you much of anything useful unless you either plan to remain in academia or plan to then do a 2 year college course or teacher’s BA to supplement them. For example, someone with a BA in english? Show me one job in the job market that requires this. Show me one.
But a BA in english coupled with a 2 year IT diploma from a technical institute like NSCC? Now you’re talking something applicable. This is an excellent combination of education for a technical writer. A technical writer can go on to become a business analyst. And so on.
YOu need to start seriously thinking op. You need to know exactly what sort of job you want.
Then look for people hiring for that job online and find out what requirements are involved for GETTING that job.
Lots of people take something like political science hoping to work in international development or something. But did you know that most of those professionals are LEGAL PROFESSIONALS? They did that degree too. And then went to law school.
Once you know what an employer requires, you know what is expected of you to get the job you want. And it doesn’t matter how you feel about it. Because the employer doesn’t care. HE is the expert and knows best what he’s looking for.
I saw grade ten once. Some people say it wasn’t all that fun but I enjoyed parts of it. My brother had SMU, I was really impressed. Nothing but class.
All I got.
Fast food general managers don’t make 90-120K a year, at least not in NS…
Not to mention these uni graduates make it harder for people who are happy (or at least not completely miserable) to work low wage jobs to even get a job. Bachelors degrees are the new high school diplomas and high school graduates are the new dropouts.
I didn’t give a flying fig if someone had 10 degrees or grade 9 when I was hiring (my people were making 15-19/hr in 2003 ) I hired the people who looked like they could do the job properly. even if it was just for a year before they headed off to something else like grad studies or waiting for the force to accept them. I hired people who had been army captains, salad preppers, tai chi instructors, life guards whatever.
fast food can make money. not at the individual store level, but at the regional level. a company owns 5 stores in an area. be the manager for that district covering those stores. then head office notices you. a lot of this involves travel of course. heck, my niece worked in one of those s**n stores in the prairies. ended up being the buyer for the whole chain. she could go to mars on the air miles. she decided to take university for a couple degrees while she was working. no student loans.
When was 16, I played Santa Claus and made $20/hour!
THE ANSWER: A LIFE OF CRIME
“I am a graduate from a University (sic) (5 years ago) (sic) I am sick of dead end (sic) jobs in Nova Scotia.” Going back to school
Well, you went to university for the wrong reason. You went for the money but you should have gone for an education. I know you don’t understand the difference between training and education. The first concerns money, the second concerns the cultivation of the mind.
Since language-use is the mirror of the mind, your punctuation and grammar indicate that you do not have one. Do not go back to school. Education is wasted on you. Have you tried a life of crime?
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!
I was hired as a clown for $50 bucks once….
several children cried.
I’d do it again.
I can’t speak for the OB, but when I was finishing high school, the rhetoric that we got from all the baby boomers (our parents, teachers, other adults with some sort of authority in our lives) around us was “you have to get a university degree so you can get all these awesome jobs that we’ll be retiring from when you’re done university”. Then the boomers wouldn’t retire and we were stuck with debt that we started accumulating when we were too young to really understand what we were doing taking out student loans and whatnot.
montrealman, I agree with you in principle, but that’s not what many of us were told when we were making expensive decisions about the rest of our lives! A lot of us were told “get a degree because it will get you a job.”
heck, I know a lot of us boomers were stoned out of our minds during the 60’s and 70’s but some of that makes no sense whatsoever.
‘so you can get all these awesome jobs that we’ll be retiring from’. how on earth is a university degree going to teach you what it took 45 years to learn ‘on the job’?
did you think that you could step out of university into a management level position? I don’t have any sniff of a degree, and it wouldn’t have done a thing to help me in my job or to get me where I am today (which is a pretty fine position) I am currently training 4 people to do what I do. good hearts they have, but they will never know what I know because they didn’t experience all the situations first hand over the years, and no one can spew it all out, every oddity/exception/one-ofs that happen.
most work, I suspect, is like that. day to day learning and acquiring knowledge and the ability to remember what you did the last time that cropped up. you get that by starting at the bottom, where you can’t do much harm, and where there are people around who can help you learn. if you were to jump into management, think of the mess you would make.
my ‘owner’ has offered, and given me, heaven on earth to keep me from retiring because he can’t afford to lose the knowledge I have. anyone can get that knowledge by working. hard.
and speaking as a parent, since I have to come up with the money from time to time to bail out someone with an albatross of a student loan, believe me I never, ever encouraged my spawn to get one. the kid with the grade 9 plus army experience makes 4 times what the degree riddled kid does. and he started in a friggin call centre when he mustered out.
I got my first job on-air by offering to work for free, after midnight, in place of a taped program.
student loan system sucks. and its crummy to be stuck with one, but instead of waiting for a job that’s ‘worth your time’ take anything and give it your best. it benefits YOU.
and re reading the original post, op is going back to school???? wtf? are you getting more student loans? that’s just deferring the pain.
LMAO zZzedward…children cried, too funny
clowns are scary! (I might even say creepy)
op… do you have a talent? This can be a great way of generating additional income. Sure, you’re not likely going to earn the salary of a recognized celebrity (but who knows right?) but at the very least you can earn a bit of extra moolah.
http://cracked.com/ pays its writers. Quite nicely i might add. You’re allowed to write under a pen name (because let’s face it. Who wants “5 BDSM fetishes that were once medieval torture techniques” on their resume of accomplishments?) This is just one example but come on. Andy Warhol said that in the future, everybody would have a chance to be famous if they wanted it so.. if you’re inclined toward the creative, reach out and grab it.
I know that’s a pipe dream but with a degree in english or drama, why the fuck not?
At the very least, do whatever it takes to plan better this time. It’s not your fault op. It’s a lie they tell us all. Because i was science minded, I was lucky. That’s the only difference between you and me.
Rumoured to be a portrait of Zed from his “Pierrot Period”
http://www.museumofbadart.org/images/p-pop…
or a real life creepy clown http://murderpedia.org/male.G/images/g/gac…
was doing a show once where some poor little kid took one look at a clown and started screaming his head off. ‘UGGY MONKEY!”
its Friday. I have a large jug of sangria calling my name and burgers for the bbq. salut friends!
I haven’t worked in an oil field or done any work around Fort Mac since I’ve been in Alberta. There’s plenty of work in Calgary, but finding a damn place to live is next to impossible, and was insane even before the flood. I’m cheaply renting out a small office room from a couple friends for the time being.
The point is, while some of the best money is available in the oil fields or doing almost any job up north, Alberta in general is full of work if you want it. Jobs that pay $11-12 in Nova Scotia might be available for over $18 just in Calgary alone. I haven’t done any work here for less than $15 an hour, which I consider to be a low wage.
Don’t worry about Mother Earth. She did fine long before man and will do fine long after we are gone.
RSVP
: jgoreham (08/16, 4:08PM)
I’m glad to hear that you agree with me in principle but the distinction between education on the one hand and training on the other is also true in practice. The purpose of education (“educare,” Latin – “to lead out of”) is to cultivate the mind. One is brought out of oneself and one’s narrow, petty concerns to immerse oneself, as the expression goes, in “all the best that has been thought and said.” In other words, one becomes immersed in one’s culture without which there is no life other than that of the barbarian. In the course of doing so, one acquires the transformative powers of structured and sustained thought. Make no mistake: Structured and sustained thinking is what it means to be a human being.
But look at the rest of the comments on this thread. For them education is not a matter of becoming human. On the contrary, it has been debased into training, the purpose of which is just getting a job. To debase education into some form of training is not, as some here appear to suppose, to acquire the transformative powers by which one becomes human – think of the scorn with which they jeer at the “Humanites,” at the BA – but rather it is to adopt the mentality of the slave. The slave, of course, is not a true human being. He is not “free” in any meaningful sense of the term. While arrogantly priding himself on his pragmatic, means-end mentality, he is little more than an empty functionary, a placeman, a time-server. His life has no meaning. “In the sweat of thy face,” as the old biblical injunction has it, “shalt thou eat bread.” For the slave, that is all that there is. In the sweat of his face he shall eat his bread for his bread is all that there is. Of course, never having emerged out of himself, never having become human, the slave will never understand this. That is what it means to be a slave.
Never confuse education and training. You do so at the peril of your being.
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!
Blah, Blah, Blah…yes, MM, we get it. It’s always the same education-vs-training diatribe you spout every time someone writes a bitch about it. Training is for real people who live in the real world, where obtaining skills in order to get a job are imperative. Education is for “poor little rich kids”, like MM, who can afford to spend vast amounts of their parents money maintaining their “intellectual superiority” over the “underclass”, and growing their intellectual penis so anyone who is actually interested can measure it against their own. It’s really sad that some of us cannot be confident enough in ourselves to not measure our self worth by the letters after our names.
Op, you are a self entitled twit, dilusional, selfish, and narcicisstic. Why? You believe that world owes you a high paying job because you have a university degree. Well, i have news for you, employers don’t give a shit about the piece of paper that you hang on your wall. You want the get paid lots of money? Then start figuring out how to make lots of money for your employer.
Having the ability to provide value to your employer is how you make money . And having the ability is not enough, you need to actually provide that value to your employer every day.
Imo, there are too many ‘walking dead’ employees out there that believe that showing up to work and having a degree is all they need. Try engaging yourself in your job. Try giving a damn about the same things that your employer gives a damn about.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-mo…
Good dog Molly as a grown up with some perspective I agree! That said, I’m from rural southwest Nova. In the very late 90’s and early 2000’s when I was graduating, university was presented to me and fellow students like me as a way out of being either a lobster fisherman or a lobster fisherman’s wife who works at a fishplant. I think it’s obvious that nobody had any business encouraging me to go to university; I’m clever and hard working, but I’m not an academic. That was a poor choice for 17 year old me to make and it’s a sin that responsible adults in my life didn’t intervene. PS I certainly am not referring to management when I talk about good jobs. Management looks pretty soul-crushing!
Frankly, between unions, boomers not retiring, and heavy student debt loads, people like me (which is to say, experienced, well-trained Gen Y and Millennial types) will never get ahead in this province. I will be working poor for the rest of my goddamned life. I’ve worked internationally in my field of work, and local potential workplaces won’t even give me an interview for jobs which I am factually a good fit for. Nova Scotia hates people under the age of 50.
RSVP
: Stephen Harper (08/18, 1:01PM)
“Training is for real people who live in the real world, where obtaining skills in order to get a job are imperative.”
Well, Stephen, I agree entirely that training is concerned with obtaining skills in order to get a job. However, your reference to “the real world” is problematic. You see, your definition is based upon the philosophy of pragmatism which asks only one question: “Does it have instrumental value?” In other words, in the present context, “Does it have a cash value?” In contrast, my “real world” transcends such purely instrumental concerns. Of course, man must eat in order to live but, as the old expression goes, “Man does not live by bread alone.”
In addition, while I realize that your reference to “the real world” was only intended in a narrowly metaphorical sense, the question, “What is the real world?” is profoundly philosophical. Indeed, it is THE ontological question. (Interestingly, I am now reading a book – among others, of course – that asks precisely THE ontological question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”) However, and this is important Stephen, that question will never arise in the course of training but only in the course of an education properly conceived. I trust you will agree.
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!
Can you say that again, MM? I’m not trained to be a philosophizer.
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: Stephen Harper (08/19, 1:38PM)
Very disappointing, Stephen, very disappointing. You should have realized by now that one is not “trained” to be a philosopher since being a philosopher is not a “job” in the ordinary sense of the term. One has transcended the cash nexus. It is, rather, a state of being-in-the-world. One becomes one as a result of becoming educated in the fullest sense of the word, i.e., when one becomes an autonomous, reflective thinker. I see that I still have a lot of work to do, Stephen.
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!
Idiot!!!
most business owners like to make money, they want to be successful. they want their companies to survive so they won’t have to go out and be someone else’s employee. I think that’s pretty fair to say, eh? they do not want to fail/go broke.
so why would they pass up a good employee who is fully qualified to do the job in favour of someone over 50 who probably comes at a higher price? hiring someone is similar to buying a product. you want the best quality product and the cheapest price you can get it. you don’t voluntarily pay $100 more for the exact same toaster you could get for 29.99. ( in the tar sands of course, all 29.99 toasters are priced at $229.99 but that’s a different market – back to this later)
however, you may pay $129.99 for a toaster if it can do much more than the 29.99 brand/model. if it also washes dishes, makes your coffee and does your taxes at the end of the year. but then, the two toasters are not equivalent. you get ‘more’ from the 129$ one. or perhaps the $129 toaster has a proven performance record. consumer reviews says it reliable and will consistently toast your daily bread without popping a fuse. and the 29$ toaster has dreadful consumer reviews. even though they may do the same job of toasting, you will have to replace the $29 one every 6 months, so elect to buy the $129 version instead.
so with all the bread being cast upon the daily waters, what I mean is why would anyone in the business of staying in business prefer to pay more to an oldster to do what you believe is the same job you could do? it doesn’t make economic sense. business owners are not that charitable that they would be kind to some old fart and keep them employed.
regarding the international employment, business is business. if you were hired there it means you were marketable there. it means you were the best candidate for that job at that time in that area. or, it was like alberta now, which is so desperate for people many businesses really will hire just about anyone because they need a warm body to fill the spot. its a great market in which to gain experience.
when I was younger I really wanted to go live in Labrador, but it was a lousy job market in my field (media) , so I didn’t move there. that’s not unfair, and no one was undervaluing me. its just the market. so I went where the job was.
and regarding bad decisions at 17. hoo boy. I can still remember 17 enough to remember it would take a team of wild horses to make me do something I didn’t want to do, or to dissuade me from a path I wanted to take. my 17 year old brain thought I could pack a baby on my back and hitchhike through California picking fruit with a photographer buddy. heigh ho.
I expect increasingly miserable gen x, y & z-ers are going to start picking off anyone over 50 who is keeping them from their rightful high income jobs.
HARPER. You ROCK!!!
RSVP
: Stephen Harper (08/19, 2:49PM)
Stephen, you must remember that outbursts like that say more about you than they do about me. You must try to cultivate structured, sustained thought. It’s the only way.
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!
Bro Tim was going to be both a professional wrestler and a boxer but he was in both special education and excelled in home economics cooking.