"And after you graduate...?"

“So what are you planning on doing when you graduate? I mean, what do you do with a degree in ________ anyways?”

This is probably one of the most aggravating questions that could be put together in the English language. It is also one of the leading causes of stress and anxiety in the latter days of ones university career. Based on my preliminary research (extracurricular, of course) there is a direct correlation between the heightened anxiety levels of undergraduate students and the frequency with which the above question is posed.

I think sometimes that I should have made this my thesis statement. I could take my hobby full time, and put some real work behind it, instead of following it only to avoid more pressing obligations. In that sense it shares time with watching candles burn (while anticipating and controlling wax overflows), cleaning my work area (‘I can’t work like this!’) and adjusting page margins on papers that are almost long enough.

The worst part of The Question is the knowing smirk with which it is most commonly accompanied, the look that says “You have no idea what’s coming next, sucker…” That look always burns me, especially when it emerges in the middle of someone telling me that I am too young and idealistic.

Since when did being idealistic become an insult? To most, my intelligence is negated by my age; my ideals are rendered irrelevant by my lack of experience.

As I sit down in front of my computer once more, I wonder idly why my choice of subject matter has become so irrelevant. I am studying Sociology; the study of human society, how it works, and how it should work. How did that become passé without me knowing it? When I reply to questions as to what I am studying, I find the word ‘just’ slips in before the word ‘Sociology’. I bite my tongue every time, and then launch on the immediate defensive, explaining in what I imagine is an almost desperate tone the virtues of my avenue of study.

My thesis project is just another nail in my coffin. I’m writing about Karl Marx, historical materialism and revolution (or the possibility thereof) in the present day. What really sucks is that apparently Marx was wrong. Everyone tells me that. Somehow it seems that it was scientifically proven, and I’m just beating a dead horse because I can’t even find the part that’s wrong. It’s all very embarrassing.

But telling me that some long-dead theorist is wrong is one thing (whether that’s true or not), it’s entirely another thing when people constantly repeat, as if by rote, that I am still young and idealistic. I think more than anything, that scares me. It’s as if you could talk to all the ghosts of all of the people who jumped out of the plane before you, and they all shook their heads in and smirked to each other that “You’re young, and you still believe that parachutes work.” Ouch.
So I am one week away from graduating, everything I’ve learned is apparently wrong, my thesis is - by extension - utter bullshit, and I’m beginning to doubt whether my parachute works or not.
I’m most scared because maybe it all means that nobody in the ‘real world’ has ideals, and that for the first third of my life I have been raised to believe in some sort of elaborate Santa Claus, and the latter two-thirds of my life will be spent having people laugh at me for ever having been so stupid in buying into such a thing.

I wonder if I will be able to find a job where I’m allowed to have morals, maybe even an ideal or two. I realize that I am setting myself up for trouble. I am on the brink of graduation. I should be lining up gainful employment, looking to get a few feet ahead in the rat race. Instead I am pouring all of my waking efforts into finishing my thesis, which seems to put me further and further from practical reality with every word that I write.

A lot of my feelings have been seeping into my thesis lately, and I have spent the last few sections raving about the failure of true Marxism to ever really historically materialize (Sociology joke, ha, ha)