When I was growing up, my dad had a famous saying in our household: “Do it right the first time, or you’ll be doing it again.”
By the time I was 10 years old, I knew exactly what he would say before double-checking all my chores. It didn’t matter what chore it was: cleaning my room, mowing the lawn, raking leaves. That tedious little sentence came after all of them.
Between my brother, my sister and myself, I heard this phrase repeated in military fashion during my younger years. There were days when I would clean my room three or four times over. I was young, and I didn’t care if the shutters in my room had a little dust on them or if the dishes still had a few spots here or there -- to me, it was all just utterly and unnecessarily meticulous.
I wanted to be done with whatever I was doing. I wanted to move past my chores and play -- move on with my day. I wanted to go out and be rewarded for at least what I considered hard work without ever having to work to do them. It was the mentality of the era of instant gratification.
For something as simple as chores, “Do it right first or do it again,” seems like it's not a big deal. And of course you’re right, it isn’t. For a lazy, child doing chores is a low-stakes game. But what happens when you add tens of thousands of dollars to doing something right the first time?
Is college something we can afford to do again? This puts a lot of pressure on doing it right the first time through. But what does it really mean to do it right the first time?
To many students, doing it right encompasses earning a practical degree such as a business degree or a political science degree so it will be easier to find a job after graduation. Others believe doing college right the first time is following their passions under an arts degree or a music degree without thinking of what comes next.
Both of these types, while educated and aware of a stale job market, are convinced that they will have a job coming out of college. It is an underlying vice of entitlement that has led us to this belief. We have grown up in what I like to call the Era of Instant Gratification.
Everything we as millennials have had growing up has indoctrinated us to this the feeling that four years and a piece of paper entitles us to a job that puts us in a decent apartment with a small car, with maybe even a pet to keep us company. It was the instant microwaved dinners, it was the streamable music, and it was the entirety of the world’s knowledge at the press of a button. The idea that we have to really work for any of these things makes us cringe.
With a belief of instant gratification comes a belief of instant job gratification. The Era of Instant Gratification has almost obliterated the idea of the starter job -- that one would work at the very bottom of a company earning a small but livable hourly wage.
However, many believe the hourly wage coming out of college comes attached with a taboo. People didn’t go through four difficult years of school and pay tens of thousands of dollars to get an hourly wage for a job that requires little experience. But what job experience does one really have coming out of college besides perhaps an internship one summer? This leads some companies to disguise an hourly wage as a salary.
Companies will hire young college graduates on fixed hours weekly with an hourly wage and advertise it as making a steady salary. This, while a little deceitful, is actually a step in the right direction as far as the companies are concerned. It slowly lifts the taboo that comes with those two words: hourly wage.
But for the companies to take this clever step is not enough. We need to take a step towards them as well by accepting lower jobs to start. If we can get over our instant gratification complex for the first couple of years after college, then we can really begin to get on with our careers. Doing college right the first time is not about your degree, but about what you do with your degree. Let’s do it right the first time so we don’t have to do it again.
