I’ll succeed next semester

Posted on Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Written by Karon Liu

Next to spam, the e-mails I hate to see most in my Ryerson account are the ones that lists names of people in my program who have won scholarships, awards or are coming back to give a lecture after landing a successful job overseas.

We congratulate them, shower them with applause and give them a pat on the back — one for every entry in their resume that eventually earned them the prestigious job that everyone would give their left testicle for.

But deep down, even though we love our peers, we love to see them fail even more. Their failure means we’re all back on level playing fields. The countdown clock towards becoming successful suddenly has another few minutes added to it. I don’t feel guilty not looking for employment or networking during my first two years of university.

When someone in our class is one step closer to their dream, we’re left questioning where we went wrong. Was it wrong to spend our weekends with our families rather than locked in a library cubicle combing over
existentialist theories? Should we not spend our summer backpacking across Europe, but go job-hunting instead?

Of course, this jealousy is not condoned. After all, no one wants to be a Jan Brady and blame Marsha (x3) for all of our shortcomings.

Nevertheless, the success of our peers comes across as unexpected. We have four years in this bubbly institution to make mistakes, learn the theories and find our identities at the bottom of a pint of Alexander Keith’s.

How dare these undergrads have the audacity to go out into the real world and get some premature glory? Don’t they know that internships and placements aren’t supposed to come until the final year of university? They just love to make everyone else feel bad, don’t they?

So what’s a green-eyed monster to do? A textbook answer would be to stop wallowing in self-pity and spread unfounded hatred toward others by telling people how moronic they were in class. They’re the ones who took the initiative to make a career out of themselves instead of expecting the school to hand them a job on a silver platter.

But in a more realistic setting, the solution is clichéd. It’s overused but that’s because it works in a way: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Channel this hatred to establish your own career and achieve whatever your definition of success is. Next thing you know, people will be reading your name in their Ryerson e-mails and secretly making bets with their friends on when you’ll be canned for making the company lose millions or sleeping with the cleaning lady. Welcome to the real world.