Rachel Toor, Professor, Department of English and Philosophy, Eastern Washington University
During the pandemic, the editor of my previous book (on writing the college admissions essay) suggested a new topic. She described how her friends in various fields were put off by braggy, self-centered job cover letters submitted by recent grads. All me, me, me, and nothing about why they wanted to work for a specific organization, or even, an awareness of what the mission of the place was.
Kids today, they said, were arrogant, narcissistic little jerks.
When my editor described the problem to me, my response was that we can’t blame people for things they have not yet been taught. Students aren’t getting good guidance about how to present themselves on the page. And the confusion isn’t their fault. We send a message—it’s all about you—that will not hold up once they leave school.
On campus, most of us work hard to provide a sense of belonging. We stop short of telling them they’re beautiful and unique snowflakes, but we do make them feel that education is all about them. We encourage them to pursue their interests and to think for themselves.
This is all to the good, and for the generation who suffered through Zoom school, important. But we may not be instilling a mindset that will make them valuable once they leave campus. And we may not be teaching them how to express themselves in ways that, even if they have a winning attitude, comes across as eager when they’re applying for jobs.
My creative writing students at Eastern Washington University are not arrogant, narcissistic little jerks. They’re scrappy, often first-gen low-income, awesomely quirky people, and if anything, suffer from a lack of confidence and paralyzing anxiety.
So, I did an experiment. I asked them to write a cover letter to be admitted to the course they were already enrolled in. I explained the exercise was to see what they thought a good cover letter looked like; then we’d ask for volunteers willing to have their work discussed.
Holy brag-alert, bat friends! What they came up with made them look indeed like arrogant, narcissistic little jerks. Somewhere they had been told to sell themselves and boy did they ever. They wrote idiotic statements claiming they were the best and most qualified, able to leap tall buildings with one eye tied behind their back. Plus, their prose sounded more robotic than if it had been written by a bot.
Once I got the book contract, I began interviewing. Employers from pretty much every sector say the same thing: new graduates are a drain on resources until they learn the specific skills required by each organization. The head of scientific research at a large company told me, “I don’t care what they learned in school, where they got a degree, or even if they have a degree. They’re worthless to me until I train them.” Based on an awesome series of interviews, he had hired an engineer who hadn’t even gone to college.
So, what do employers say they want? Job applicants with a mindset of “humble, hungry, and smart.” They want people who know how much they don’t know and are willing to bust their butts and learn. They don’t care about majors, give zero hoots about minors, and certificates—except those from nationally recognized organizations—matter not a whit.
Campus career centers help students set up LinkedIn profiles and even give templates for resumes (one page!) and cover letters (one page!). They offer interview practice and clothes closets in addition to providing all sorts of help on the job search. But national numbers show how few students take advantage of these resources.
Faculty are probably in the best position to help students launch into careers. STEM faculty often focus explicitly on job preparation and experiential learning. Professors in the humanities and social sciences know how to advise students applying to graduate and professional schools. Mini-Me, you complete me! But many of us haven’t applied for jobs outside of academe, or at least for a couple of decades, and we often lean on the idea that we’re here to train people to think critically, communicate clearly, and engage with the world in ways that are, well, interesting. We sometimes sniff at anything that has the whiff of careerism.
The fact is, preparing students for the world of work is not at odds with the core values of a liberal arts education. We’re all working against a rising tide of suspicion from legislators, parents, and students who care less about dining on an intellectual feast and more about putting food on the table. Programs and departments get cut because students are voting with their feet, and they are not marching into certain disciplines.
But with a bit of tweaking, we can show how what we teach will help students succeed after college. Embedding in a curriculum, especially early in a student’s career, a sense of how to translate skills shouldn’t be a heavy lift. Organizations like The QA Commons help instructors with this. There are also ed tech and ed adjacent businesses that will scoop our students right out from under us if we don’t change.
Younger faculty, often still burdened by their own overwhelming debt, are well aware of the challenges students will face and they tend to be quickest to embrace thinking differently about their roles. Also, they understand this is an equity issue. At my fancy-pants college reunion a few years ago, the dean did a self-congratulatory presentation about how many students majored in the humanities. Good for you, you snobby things, I thought. A person could concentrate on basket weaving at those colleges and the networking opportunities alone will open plenty of doors.
But most students are not enrolled at one of the few dozen schools The New York Times thinks represent higher ed. And many do not have parents with powerful friends to grease the wheels for them.
Still, as much as we need to help our students understand what they have to offer, we may also have to deliver a message that’s harder for them to hear. Once they’re out in the world, no one cares about them. Or rather, not until they’ve done the work to be valuable to an organization that has as its goal something other than their personal and intellectual development.
For me, as with most things, this is a both/and issue. We can teach from within our disciplines and get our students ready for careers. We can make their education about them and help them understand how things will change once they leave the nest. We can inculcate a mindset of giving rather than taking and show them that they need to direct their gaze outward.
And then, we can teach them to present themselves on the page and in interviews in their own quirky and authentic voices. Because while the bots may be taking a lot of jobs, we’re still going to need humans to mind the shop.
Rachel Toor, professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, is author of Why You, Why Me, Why Now: The Mindset and Moves to Land That First Job, from Networking to Cover Letters, Resumes, and Interviews and a contributing editor at Inside Higher Ed.
