Internship announcement

The successful candidate has been decided! We welcome Owain Mumford to the Hot Rant fold! Although he met none of the employment criteria it turns out our fathers used to know each other. And his application was faultless. For all those who applied and failed here's what you should have done. As a humanities student at a top 10 UK institution, Owain is about as unemployable as it’s possible to get without being on various government lists. So we extend to him the false promise of future employment and the chance to acquire crucial workplace skills such as 'moving boxes', 'tidying up crap we can't be bothered with' and 'duplicating tasks for no apparent reason except finding you something to do'. Owain, your CV will never be the same again. It's the perfect stepping stone to the 100ft vertical cliff face that is the jobs market.


As certain members of HotRant staff have recently discovered, having a degree is no guarantee of gainful employment in these dark economic times. Our own Fred Carnegy has been luckless in the job market, while Tom Howells is being made redundant from an internship which barely keeps him in organic elderflower cordial and Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference sundried tomatoes as it is.

It’s a baleful picture which has been borne out (sans Howells’ favourite braised duck and focaccia bread) in newsprint: the guardian recently reported this year’s pretty grim statistics of graduate unemployment last week to a collective groan from finalists. For those too idle or too busy frantically scanning Gumtree, it also says that a similar number will be unemployed next year at least, if not for the next four.

Unsurprisingly, government ministers have moved quickly, mainly by making soothing wooshy noises and showy token gestures. David Lammy said quite sensibly in January, when this hoo-ha started, that a degree was still the cornerstone of many a long career, just in case some people didn’t think it was worthwhile anymore. Meanwhile, a giant talking egg prophesied that students everywhere would eat each other in the mad, undignified scrabble for even the most menial jobs. Or something. Lammy added that the government would be working with the likes of Barclays to provide graduate schemes for struggling students; because of course they’ve got 40,000 of those knocking around.

In any case, such bald statistics don’t really consider the distinction between graduates not getting their ideal job and not getting a job at all. The unpalatable truth for students is that some will have to slum it for a while in soul-destroying database tedium. For an unfortunate number, Lammy hints, it may mean they never end up in their ideal job. Then again, how many people in this country, nay the world, end up in their ideal job? The best advice it seems is to find employment, any employment, for the time being, until your junket in the Maldives eating Turkish delight and teaching Fred Goodwin’s children to do the Times crossword becomes available.

Then again it’s not unreasonable for graduates to want a return from their sizeable investment into higher education: let’s face it; it’s a pretty enormous waste of three years and 20 odd grand if you’re going to end up hurling dead otters at passers-by in some slave-wage Keynesian burlesque. It’s also a rather humourless irony that being the first in-take to pay top-up fees, this year’s finalists emerge with worse job prospects than their less encumbered predecessors. Personally I find it sad that degrees have been reduced to such commercial proportions: some now see degrees merely as a premium worth paying to get ahead in the job market. Most of the jobless won’t take consolation in the government's 'largesse'. Doubtless they’d rather be in a position to start paying their loan back, and be able to buy the duck and focaccia bread while they’re at it. Owain Mumford