All Posts Tagged With: "graduation"

Comedian says that dreams can change, but that’s OK

Conan O’Brien is just one of the many comedians who have given commencement speeches at U.S. schools this graduation season. His was arguably the funniest — and the most wise. Here’s a recording of Sunday’s speech to the Class of 2011 at Dartmouth College. Here’s how it started:

“Graduates, faculty, parents, relatives, undergraduates, and old people that just come to these things: Good morning and congratulations to the Dartmouth Class of 2011. Today, you have achieved something special, something only 92 percent of Americans your age will ever know: a college diploma. That’s right, with your college diploma you now have a crushing advantage over 8 percent of the workforce. I’m talking about dropout losers like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg…”

He also poked fun at the general laziness of today’s college students, their propensity for stimulants and Wikipedia, like this:

“When I got the call two months ago to be your speaker, I decided to prepare with the same intensity many of you have devoted to an important term paper. So late last night, I began. I drank two cans of Red Bull, snorted some Adderall, played a few hours of Call of Duty, and then opened my browser. I think Wikipedia put it best when they said “Dartmouth College is a private Ivy League University in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States.”

And, more seriously, he talks about how found success, by accepting that “dreams change.”

Your path at 22 will not necessarily be your path at 32 or 42. One’s dream is constantly evolving, rising and falling, changing course. This happens in every job, but because I have worked in comedy for twenty-five years, I can probably speak best about my own profession.

Way back in the 1940s there was a very, very funny man named Jack Benny. He was a giant star, easily one of the greatest comedians of his generation. And a much younger man named Johnny Carson wanted very much to be Jack Benny. In some ways he was, but in many ways he wasn’t. He emulated Jack Benny, but his own quirks and mannerisms, along with a changing medium, pulled him in a different direction.

And yet his failure to completely become his hero made him the funniest person of his generation. David Letterman wanted to be Johnny Carson, and was not, and as a result my generation of comedians wanted to be David Letterman. And none of us are. My peers and I have all missed that mark in a thousand different ways. But the point is this : It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It’s not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound re-invention.

So, at the age of 47, after 25 years of obsessively pursuing my dream, that dream changed. For decades, in show business, the ultimate goal of every comedian was to host The Tonight Show. It was the Holy Grail, and like many people I thought that achieving that goal would define me as successful. But that is not true. No specific job or career goal defines me, and it should not define you. In 2000—in 2000—I told graduates to not be afraid to fail, and I still believe that. But today I tell you that whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality.

Ambitious grads find big rewards—in between toys and housewares

Loblaw, Wal-Mart, L’Oréal and Abercrombie & Fitch are lacing up their gloves and pounding banks, hotels and financial service firms in the perennial grudge match to entice the world’s top graduates. They’re the scrappy underdogs going up against the established heavyweight champions, but now they’re employing the same secret weapon that’s been up the sleeves of the other industries for years—manager-in-training programs.

“In an environment where Loblaw is competing with Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, Shoppers Drug Mart and, soon, Target, there’s no room for complacency. It’s a ruthlessly competitive landscape,” says Jeff Muzzerall, director of the Corporate Connections Centre at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “Now is a wonderful opportunity for retail to showcase itself.”

Alix Carter never expected her dream HR job to involve walking the aisles of a grocery store or asking a group of colleagues huddled between rows of frozen pizza and granola bars trivia about the founding of the company. But now, she says, she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“A lot of people might see retail and get scared away,” she says. Grad@Loblaw “showcased an industry that is overlooked by a lot of graduates.”

Continue reading Proud to be retail

The push to make grads more job-ready may be killing the liberal arts tradition

Ian Collins was almost a cliché. He finished a degree in visual arts at the University of Western Ontario and then spent four years waiting tables. “I was going in for job interviews, but I wouldn’t get the job,” explains the Toronto resident. The deal breaker? “It was always because someone else had real-world experience.” So Collins decided to enrol in a one-year diploma in sport and event marketing at George Brown College because, he says, it had a built-in internship. That led to a job after graduation, and now he’s an account executive at the marketing firm Zoom Media. At 31, Collins has his career on track. “College helped me by getting my foot in the door,” he says.

It’s no wonder students like Collins are looking to college for a different path. Despite the fact that Canada has the second-highest rate of education spending in proportion to our GDP, we’re nearly the worst of the 32 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries when it comes to placing grads in jobs they are qualified for. That’s especially hard to swallow considering the price of education today. With student debt load reaching a record high—nearly $27,000 for university students last year and about half that for college grads—more Canadians than ever before are considering college as a less expensive, more job-oriented alternative to the ivory towers.

Following the trend at universities, college presidents across the country are reporting increased enrolment since the recession. While Statistics Canada does not have recent numbers for the colleges, the Association of Canadian Community Colleges expects enrolment levels to be at an all-time high this year.

Converts like Collins are not the only ones praising the college alternative these days. Bill Green, chairman and CEO of the $21.6-billion consulting firm Accenture, is an outspoken advocate of community colleges. The greatest proof of his commitment: he convinced his 21-year-old son David to go to Dean, a community college in Massachusetts, instead of one of America’s elite private universities. “I believe many people who attend universities might be better served attending a community college to get started,” says Green, also a Dean graduate. “Colleges have been overlooked, undervalued and underappreciated for far too long.”

In the U.S., community colleges are seen as a panacea for the country’s economic woes: President Barack Obama and second lady Jill Biden held the first-ever White House summit on community colleges in October. International foundations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, also pledged millions of dollars to community colleges.

Even those on the inside of the ivory towers advise students to consider their options. Laura Penny, a professor at Mount Saint Vincent in Halifax and author of More Money Than Brains, an acerbic tome about higher education today, says university is too often seen as the default after high school. “People who want a broad experience or who are going to qualify for medicine, law or graduate degrees should go to university.”

Everyone else, she says, should look elsewhere. “I think a lot of people who go to university would be much happier in community college, and less indebted. Especially if what they are looking for is the credential for a job. A university degree does not guarantee a job.”

Ashley Pelletier took the college route after high school. Now, at 24, she has already landed a job as an associate at a big accounting firm in Toronto. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was in high school, and going to college didn’t require all the specific courses that are required for university.” She applied to a variety of programs at Seneca College and settled on accounting.

There, she found small class sizes, helpful teachers and lots of guidance for her career. “You get to know your profs and all of them had relevant industry experience,” she explains. “University is totally theoretical, whereas the professors at college are more practical.” While in college, she worked at RBC Dexia, and then translated her accounting and finance diploma into an accounting degree at York University. She sees her three years at Seneca as a bridge to her career. “It was a long haul but I don’t think I would have done as well at university if I didn’t start at college.”

Pelletier’s experience—capping a college diploma with a university degree—is also indicative of the increasingly porous border between colleges and universities. Seneca College president David Agnew says colleges and universities used to have distinct purposes, but “now, that’s completely changed.”

With six months left at university, even trivial things now seem to have a much greater significance.

In the spring of my final year of high school I got a little bit stir crazy. I could not wait to move on to bigger and better things. My last fall semester as an undergrad is half over, and I am starting to feel a grasping at straws hysteria. It is a nostalgic longing for the fleeting best days of my life. If I had the chance to go back to freshman year and do it over again, I would do it in a heartbeat. And I would gladly repeat these past years at university many times over, because it does not get much better than this.

When I was a freshman, I measured my first year at Carleton University in all my different firsts. I remember my first lecture, the first time checking out a book from the library, handing in my first essay, writing my first exam in a cold gym and as nerdy as it sounds, it was always exciting for me to cross my next post-secondary hurdle.

I realized something a few weeks ago while I was packing for Thanksgiving. Sadly, as a graduating student in my fourth year, my outlook has changed. I no longer see things as brand new and exciting; instead I’m looking at every milestone as a last. That was my last Thanksgiving long weekend as a university student; my last Halloween at Carleton, and that midterm on Tuesday was last test I have to write for the fall semester.

I know how gloomy this all sounds. I’m trying to stay away from the 2012/end of the world fear mongering, but my clock is ticking. The cure for Senioritis is not to slack off! You have to keep pushing forward. When you only have six months left of university life, you have to make every second count.

But critics say stats are misleading, are instead a “politically useful number”

Ontario’s Liberal government boasted of another increase in high school graduation rates Monday, but opposition critics warned the numbers aren’t telling the whole story.

That’s because the province is still using a five-year standard to measure graduation rates for its four-year high school program, even though Grade 13 was eliminated in Ontario in 2003.

The high school graduation rate was 77 per cent last year, up from 75 per cent the year before, said Education Minister Kathleen Wynne.

When questioned about the numbers, Wynne conceded the graduation rate included students who took five years to complete the four-year high school program.

“There are lots of kids who want to take courses that they can’t fit into their timetables, so they come back in that fifth year to do that, and I think that’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do,” she said.

“What we wouldn’t want to do is set up a situation where we weren’t counting those kids as graduating from high school, (because) it doesn’t make any sense.”

The opposition parties welcomed the improvement in the graduation rate, but questioned the validity of the numbers and the government’s methodology.

“The government hasn’t been totally forthcoming in some of the efforts they’ve been using in order to make it appear that things are better than they were in the past,” said Progressive Conservative critic Elizabeth Witmer.

On her first day in the legislature as leader of Ontario’s New Democrats, Andrea Horwath said she was worried the numbers were designed to make graduation rates look better than they actually are.

“The government is more concerned with generating a politically useful number than with ensuring that real achievement and future success of students is taking place,” said Horwath.

Despite rising unemployment, the class of 2009 shouldn’t lose hope. Yet.

Originally published in The Fulcrum

Despite a rising national unemployment rate and a recent surge in layoffs, the class of 2009 shouldn’t lose hope about their job prospects just yet.

“There will be jobs,” assures Anne Markey, executive director of the Canadian Association of Career Educators and Employers. “Will they be easy to find? Will they be exactly what graduating students want, or will it be in the location they want? Maybe not, but there will be jobs.”

With 71,000 Canadian jobs cut in November—66,000 in Ontario alone—many upcoming graduates have been left wondering whether or not they can find a place in today’s job market.

Recruitment agencies in Ontario have seen an increase of new applications following massive job cuts in both the manufacturing and the service sectors.

“Absolutely there has been an increase in the number of candidates looking for something else,” says Pierrette Brousseau, owner of the Ottawa franchise of Hunt Personnel, a national permanent and temporary employment agency.

However, she says they get very few applications from recent post-secondary graduates. “A lot of students end up getting jobs in their fields, so they don’t require our services,” she says.

Even before the global financial crisis, which gained forceful momentum in September 2008, companies have consistently hired recent graduates, explains David Rodas-Wright, coordinator of employer relations at the Student Academic Success Service (SASS) career centre at the University of Ottawa.

“There are companies out there, especially some of the big companies, [for whom] it’s not as much money to hire new talent as it is to maintain senior talent,” he says. “So they continue to look for new graduates.”

Hiring young people also serves as a way to refresh and renew the face of a corporation, according to Rodas-Wright.

Companies across the country seem to be confirming that assertion—despite economic difficulties, many have maintained or even increased hiring rates.

“We’re not cutting back at all on hiring,” says Louisa Testa, executive assistant at Ottawa’s Investors Group, a financial planning company. “Actually, we’ve hired more in the last few years than in the past.”

The Public Service Commission, the federal government branch that supervises post-secondary recruitment, has also recently increased hiring of recent graduates.