“The Kids Are Alright”

When I first began my undergraduate degree, I wanted to be a teacher. I had set my sights on teacher’s college when I was 16, and I continued that goal into my first year at the University of Guelph. I had it all planned out—I had a perfect summer job for my resume, I had references, and all I needed was the grades.
All I had to listen to day-in and day-out was that trying to become a teacher in this economy was a waste of time.
“There are no jobs in teaching.”
“Good luck getting into teacher’s college.”
I couldn’t believe how many times I heard those two statements. The kicker was that most of these statements came out of the mouths of actual teachers.
In my second year as an undergrad, I wrote my first article for The Ontarion. By this time, I had learned a lot about myself, and teaching became less and less appealing to me as journalism became the spark in my life. Naturally, as I became more and more involved with the paper, I veered away from the teacher’s college path I had paved for myself.
However, regardless of what I decided I wanted to do, I received the same feedback.
“There are no jobs in journalism.”
“Journalism is dying.”
Why even bother, right? What is the point of following your heart and chasing after what you love when you are constantly being told by everyone else that the path you are choosing is next to impossible, or just not practical.
Upon entering university, we are set up for failure. We are told our whole lives that we must get a post-secondary education to succeed in this economy. We are told that the minimum amount of education is not enough. We then enter post-secondary school, and we are told throughout our entire undergrad that there are no jobs. We are told that the likelihood of actually doing something that relates to what you studied is zero. We are told not to be picky and to just take what we can get.
We are encouraged to continue schooling and to obtain the highest possible education that would gain us a competitive advantage amongst other applicants, when at the same time we read on a job posting “minimum fives years of experience is required.”
We find ourselves thinking, how am I supposed to build that much experience, get straight A’s, achieve the level of education that I am told I need, and also pay off the ocean of debt that has accumulated?
It’s a system that seems to work against us. We are the millennial generation, and we are superheroes, and yet we seem to receive a lot of flak from our preceding generations.
And many of us, due to a pressure to succeed (whatever it means to actually “succeed”), end up forging our own paths in the economy’s overgrown sidewalks.
In a study article that was conducted in 2014, Forbes labelled millennials as the “true entrepreneurial generation.” The study went on to say that millennials have begun to drastically change the workforce. It seems that our work-life priorities have shifted, and many of us have realized that rather than being corporate zombies our whole lives, we’d like to live in fulfilling careers and lives.
I feel that a lot of this change has to do with technology and the pressure to succeed. Technology has allowed us to manage multiple jobs and projects pretty much anywhere in the world—and this ability to commute is demanding that the workforce become more flexible. The impossible expectation that we gain experience in our field, while also completing one or more degrees, has forced many of us to work multiple jobs, start side projects, volunteer, and even offer our own independent services. Freelancing has become a common path, and many students in a variety of degrees offer freelance services. It’s also a flexible path, and once you have a taste of working your own hours, it’s hard to go back.
We have probably become an entrepreneurial generation for a few reasons—we need more money than previous generations did to pay off our student debt, there aren’t jobs available in our field so we make our own, or we figure that the best way to build a resume is by creating your own experience.
Regardless, the pressure that has been placed on us to succeed has created a generation of unique workers. We have also realized that a career-oriented life isn’t fulfilling enough. We’re faced with major environmental challenges that are going to be left in our hands in the coming years. We want to work, we want to be able to afford a roof over our heads, and we want to pay off our debt, but we also need to make the world more positive, and that hinders the focus on climbing the corporate ladder that our preceding generations had. We want change – individually, socially, environmentally, and economically.
So, where does that leave us as students trying to enter the “real world?”
I’d like to use teaching as an example again, because it is a career-path that currently receives a lot of criticism. Regardless of society telling us how impossible it is to become a teacher, I have many friends who are following that path, and they are prepared. They volunteer, they work numerous jobs, they collect references, and they work hard in school. Regardless of how often they are told to give up, they continue on.
And that’s just it—we are prepared.  Forbes predicts that by 2025, Millennials will represent 75 per cent of the workforce…in less than 10 years we will be the majority of the economy.
Yes, we are Facebookers, Tweeters, Instagramers, and Snapchatters, but our ability to network, market ourselves, and understand social media is often mistaken for narcissism and poor social skills.
Our desire to have a life outside of work is mistaken for laziness, and our reluctance to settle for less is mistaken for entitlement.
We realize there has to be more to life than working for a paycheque, and we want to find it. We understand change, and we are pushing for it because, well, what else can we do?
We are Millennials—we are future nurses, doctors, teachers, writers, entrepreneurs, managers, marketers, firefighters, artists, mothers, fathers, and everything else after that, and we’re going to be alright.