Young, dumb and unemployable: An open letter to anyone who needs it

A Cambridge humanities student laments the loss of internships and the uncertain future that lies ahead


As the world has effectively come to a standstill because of our enemy Corona, it has become clear that the concerns of students extend past the end of the pandemic. If, like me, you were relying on summer internships to beef up a somewhat lacking CV, this pandemic may have placed unnecessary pressure on you. 

Now, a frenzied process of applying to any and all internships that display that reassuring ‘Still Hiring During Covid-19’ banner on CamCareers must take place. Finance work? Not really my cup of tea pre-Corona, but these desperate times mean you cannot cling onto your artistic integrity. Forced by lack of options into becoming a corporate sell out, I lament my somewhat lax attitude towards internships in the first year. Did I not have the foresight to realise a global pandemic would render my second year defunct? Apparently not, but then again: if I did, I’d have used such skills to predict the lottery numbers by now. 

As a History student, I’d already joked (with worrying frequency) about my lack of job prospects. Still, now that joke seems to take on an almost hysterical edge. Perhaps my decision to choose a degree that I’d enjoy was unwise, and my insistence that knowledge of ‘gossip that’s stuck over a few hundred years’ would somehow lead to endless employment, merely naïve. My thought that a degree from Cambridge would mean that employers would be begging me to work for them was (admittedly) the pipe dream of a ‘work smarter, not harder’ advocate. Although now it seems I did neither.

Credit: Pixabay

Now, placed back under the continuous supervision of my parents (go isolation!), they’ve found that their days are best spent posing the great philosophical question of ‘what does my child want to do with their life?’ My ‘unacceptable’ yet honest answer: win big on the lottery and live off the winnings until I reach a comfortable age, extra points if I somehow become a stock market connoisseur with said winnings. Admittedly, I was somewhat inspired by my 25% profit on an 80p share in Morrisons. It seems that devoid of anything to take up their time; my family have decided to manage my elusive future career, ensuring that the pressure is adequately applied to make sure that I cannot forget that unemployment is a genuine possibility.
Perhaps this pandemic is a blessing in disguise ( cue grasping-at-straws, silver-lining thinking)? And, rather than merely viewing this as the time in which I should have had an internship (and a considerably more impressive CV), it could be considered to be an opportunity to polish up my cover letter writing skills, which are only mildly impressive at present and apply to as many internships as humanly possible. Perhaps when this pandemic ends, the job market will be wide open, as companies try to get back to normal and hand out those coveted internships where hopeful students run errands for no pay. That being said, I already feel like an intern in my own home, constantly making cups of tea for the parentals with only a ‘thanks’ as pay.

Silver lining or not, there is no escaping that this pandemic has created a sense of panic amongst students, whose need to create a ‘well-rounded’ CV has fallen to the wayside in these ‘unprecedented’ times. (Truly sorry for the ‘U’ word, but it really does fit). Will such panic inspire job searching productivity? Let us all hope so.
Yours sincerely,

A humanities student who wrongly thought she couldn’t get more unemployable.

Header Image Credit: Pixabay