As winter break passes by, most college students are busy having fun on their vacations, chilling with their friends, and taking time off of schoolwork and taking it slow. Some of us, however, are using this time to look for internships, jobs, and scholarships for the upcoming summer to either gain experience, earn money, and hopefully pay for our tuition for the next year. I too am part of the college student group frantically looking for something to do for the summer however the longer I look for an internship/seasonal job, the less hope I have of actually landing a job. As a college freshman, this process of finding a job is more difficult than actual schoolwork due to all the prerequisites needed for a job/internship. Many of the requirements before even applying is to be at least a sophomore in college.
Looking through Google, LinkedIn, job search websites, and specific companies, I found that the job application process system is very flawed. When we attend college, we're expected to earn degrees that could help us get better-paying jobs or even land our dream jobs in the future, but what they never told us was that before even thinking of getting a job we have to have experience working with the skills needed in that job position. That's no problem with so many internships available, but the problem comes when the internships need prior skills and experience too. Some internships may not need experience but look into the skill sets of the applicants to decide who will fulfill the position. However, as a college student, we don't have the time nor the money to afford additional classes to learn these skills as most of our time and money is spent on college and getting towards that degree, so most of the skills need to come from high school or lower.
This makes it troublesome for those students who come from families that have financial issues as they can't afford to send their kids to summer classes to learn skills and the most the kids can do is do volunteer work that has no correlation to what they're studying in college. This is what results in college students working in part-time jobs and positions that use skills not correlated with what they're studying and their major. Imagine a tech student working at a fast food chain restaurant and years later when he/she graduates from college all they have on their resume is just fast food job experience, and they never learned any skills related to tech.
A flawed job system comes from a flawed culture. Sometimes it's not us the students who are trying hard enough; it's the society that we live in that forces us to not being able to showcase our hard work and determination.
