#长文创作激励计划##头条创作挑战赛##记录我的2024#
At the beginning of June, a list of the 2024 township civil servants' political examination objects sparked heated discussions, and the mediocre personal information was mixed with a graduate of Stanford University in the United States.
The so-called "sense of contrast" between the world's top 10 college graduates and rural grassroots workers makes people curious.
Whether it is difficult for students from famous foreign schools to find jobs, Lin Qi's experience may be the tip of the iceberg.
Lin Qi is a full-award master's degree from Yale University, but he failed to apply for a Ph.D. twice in the graduation season, and after applying for a job in the United States and China respectively, he did not get a suitable offer after submitting thousands of resumes.
Taking Lin Qi's job search failure as an incision, we seem to see more ordinary migrant workers in the predicament of being unable to advance or retreat in the job search field.
In October 2023, Lin Qi submitted his resume to more than 800 companies operating in the United States within five months. She studied Japanese at Beijing Foreign Affairs University with a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in literature at Yale University.
In the latest QS World University Rankings, Yale University is ranked 23rd, only three places away from Tsinghua University. And Lin Qi received only a dozen reply emails. Half are from Japanese companies, and one is from Chinese companies.
Japanese companies do not have strict requirements for work ability, and only need to pass the Japanese language ability, and then train employees after joining the company. However, in the second round of interviews for a Japanese company, when the interviewer asked how to market a certain product, Lin Qi had more than enough heart but insufficient language expression, and several key words did not know how to express them in Japanese, and finally was eliminated.
Lin Qi studied in the library
Lin Qi's interview with a Chinese company made her feel even more headache, and she commented that the other party was toxic.
During the interview, the Chinese interviewers always sit upright with serious expressions, often giving Lin Qi a double feeling of being high and perfunctory. In one interview, there were three interviewers, all of whom wore black-rimmed glasses, and the chill in their eyes through the lenses was not diminished in the slightest.
The three interviewers remained silent, as if none of them wanted to be the first to speak, making it impossible to tell if this was an invisible pressure interview or if they simply "went to work like a grave".
Rather than proving his strength, Lin Qi needs to constantly emphasize his obedience, good management, and good personality in the interview, and the interview is like a large-scale obedience test. What Lin Qi didn't expect the most was that her entrepreneurial experience turned out to be a "stain".
After graduating from her bachelor's degree, Lin Qi applied to study abroad for a year, and she originally only wanted to hold a reading club with her reading friends, but with the expansion of the scale, she began to invite knowledge bloggers to carry out online and offline lectures, and the reading club of more than ten people was expanded to hundreds of paid lectures on knowledge.
The interviewers were quite dissatisfied with Lin Qi's entrepreneurial experience, and did not ask her in detail what kind of ability she showed in entrepreneurship, but repeatedly asked "whether you can't bear to work for others after starting your own business", "is work your transition period, and you will still go back to start a business in the end".
The questions were full of inquiry, suspicion, and dissatisfaction, which made Lin Qi think that starting a business was the wrong thing.
There was also a call from a Chinese company, with a little weakness and inferiority in his tone, asking Lin Qi if he was willing to call sales and customer return visits, and when he waited for a positive reply, he still pessimistically concluded: "You graduated from Yale, and you are useless to us." Even if we admit you, it won't be long before you make the jump to big business. ”
Lin Qi thought that the other party was just joking, but he didn't expect that after the first round of interviews, he never received a call from the other party.
Lin Qi's Yale graduation photo
The dilemma faced by finding a job is such that the academic qualifications and abilities can never satisfy the interviewer, and too high or too low academic qualifications have become the threshold that is difficult to cross when looking for a job. Lin Qi is spinning around like a fly in the job market, with no clear employment criteria to indicate what she should do, and her previous efforts seem uncompetitive.
The frustration of job search made Lin Qi doubt her ability for a while, but when searching for other people's job search experiences on social software, she found that Chinese people have experienced frustration in finding jobs in the United States, and it is normal for thousands of resumes to be rejected by companies.
What's more, I submitted 10,000 resumes and still didn't find a job.
There's also a huge practical problem with finding employment in the U.S. – visas. The U.S. government stipulates that liberal arts students only have 5 months to find a job after graduation, and if they fail to find a job, they can only return to their home country.
Work permits in the U.S. are also not friendly to liberal arts students, and visas need to be drawn to obtain them. The visa is processed by the employer and requires a few thousand dollars in legal fees. Science students have a chance to draw three or four times a year, and liberal arts students have one chance, with a 25% chance of winning, which is extremely unstable for employers.
It has become a worldwide trend to emphasize rationality over literature.
At the end of the five-month job search period, Lin Qi was almost able to enter a Japanese company, but because of poor communication with personnel, the offer was finally canceled due to visa problems.
After studying in the United States for two years and looking for a job for half a year, she finally chose to return to China.
Lin Qizaohui, in high school, she has secretly decided to avoid entering the job market as much as possible and roll herself into a screw to practice 996.
In 2013, Lin failed the entrance examination and was admitted to Wuxi Key High School with a total of 800 students in the whole grade.
The school adopts a compulsory dormitory system, and the wake-up bell rings in the dormitory building at 6 o'clock every day, and all students need to sit in the classroom before 6:30 to start morning self-study. In the classroom, desks and chairs are densely stacked together, and the tables are filled with piles of tutorial books and exam papers, and students bury their heads behind obstacles and work hard to write, and the class is like a miniature ant nest. At ten o'clock in the evening, everyone dragged their tired bodies to the dormitory.
In this kind of life, you can rest for a day and a half in two weeks.
Lin Qi began to think about what the meaning of life is, "No matter how we learn, going to society is just a screw, even if it is rolled up to Tsinghua University and Peking University, it is nothing more than making a bigger screw, is this what we want?" She thought pessimistically.
In his spare time, Lin Qi likes to read existential books or Japanese literature, and the private novels of Japanese literature focus on personal feelings, allowing Lin Qi to explore the meaning of personal existence in a collectivist life, "What is the self?" What do I want? Can I not follow the group? Can I be a maverick? ”
At that time, Lin Qi only devoted 60% of his mind to studying, and the other 40% was immersed in the world of literature. After the results of the college entrance examination came out, Lin Qi played abnormally again, and the head teacher regretted that she couldn't study 100% of her heart, but this 40% was her own place that she could not give up.
Lin Qi's reading notes
Do you want to be a writer in the future? In order to find the answer, Lin Qi looked through many writers' biographies and found that this was a high-risk profession.
Osamu Dazai, Yasunari Kawabata, and Yukio Mishima all chose to commit suicide, and many writers are not in a healthy mental state. Wanting to live a decent life, Lin Qi dreamed of becoming a literary critic or, like Kafka, writing outside of work.
But in college, she realized that if she chose to take her main job as another job and her side job as literature, it would be difficult for her current work environment to support her to have time to complete her side hustle after work, and besides, she didn't want to rush into the huge and complex job market, like a salted fish without vitality and breathless to be randomly selected by the company.
She chose to continue her studies in Japanese literature and hoped to get a faculty assignment at university. This job is stable, well-paid, and ideal.
In his junior year, Lin Qi went to Waseda University in Japan for an exchange study for a year.
Studying in Japan shattered Lin Qi's illusions, and in a certain course, she completed the analysis of Kawakami Mieiko's work with her classmates, but was accused and scolded by the professor: "If you see such an interpretation, the writer himself will simply laugh to death." ”
The interpretation of the work is fluid and diverse, but the professor denies other possibilities and only recognizes a standard answer. This is contrary to the reason why Hayashi Qi was interested in Japanese literature in the first place, and she sought the existence of the individual, rather than the collective paradigmatic interpretation.
The senior at the University of Tokyo also complained to Lin Qi that the professors and emperors of Japan undoubtedly need to strictly abide by their will, and some graduate students and doctors were sexually harassed and threatened by their supervisors, but they could not defend their rights for the sake of their studies. There are also doctors who were dropped out of school after seven or eight years of study because of conflicts with their supervisors.
There are also problems with Japan's teaching system, and many postdoctoral graduates can only be hired by the school as temporary workers, teaching at the school until they are gray-haired, and they are still only "part-time contract workers", and they will be oppressed by full-time professors.
Hayashi Qi in Japan
Lin Qi immediately decided to study in the West, she had illusions about the West and hoped that the United States would protect the rights and interests of students.
While also on exchange in Japan, Lin Qi studied the TOEFL for four or five hours a day while studying the school curriculum, and because she worked hard enough, she achieved a high score on the test three months after preparing for the TOEFL. After the exam, she immediately studied for the GRE.
Because of his hard work, Lin Qi was diagnosed with depression in the first semester of his senior year and missed his application for a master's degree in the United States at the end of 2019.
In the spring of the second year, most schools closed their applications, and Lin Qi delivered an email to the remaining schools that were still open for applications, and received an offer from the University of Chicago, accompanied by a one-third of the scholarship.
The application material is a 15-page English essay, which was changed from Lin Qi's graduation thesis.
There is also a personal statement. Although he did not major in Japanese literature as an undergraduate, he had read hundreds of Japanese literature since high school, and accumulated a considerable amount until he graduated from university.
In the second year's application, Lin Qi received a full award offer from Yale University.
Yale University Campus
In the summer of 2021, Lin Qi finally came to Yale University, but the blows came one after another.
Lin Qi applied for a Master of Arts degree in Japanese literature, but Yale assigned her a tutor in Japanese film studies, and although Japanese film and Japanese literature are not very different, they are also separated by a chasm. Just as Lin Qi was gradually adapting to the life of doing research with his tutor while taking Japanese literature courses, his tutor announced his retirement at the end of the first semester.
Then, Lin Qi began a life of exile: the second professor was suddenly fired from the school at the end of the second semester; The third professor was a visiting scholar and spent only five months at Yale; Although the last professor was stable and taught Lin Qi to graduate school, the other party had just graduated with a doctorate and was at a similar level to Lin Qi, so he could not provide good guidance.
What was even more devastating was not only the panic of his two-year graduate career, but also the fact that because of the retirement of his supervisor and the constant replacement of professors, Lin Qi could not get a strong letter of recommendation when he applied for a Ph.D.
Lin Qi's dynamics
She applied to 8 universities for the first time, but was rejected. In the second year, Shenbo applied to most universities in the United States that have majors in Japanese literature and film, and even the schools ranked only 500 in the world did not let go, but still did not receive an offer.
She sent an email to her supervisor to update her PhD application and said that she hoped to continue to do research with the other party, but the other party could not read it back. Another student of the tutor also faced such a situation, and the teacher-student relationship was inexplicably weak.
When applying to other schools, she sent an email to ask her tutor if she would enroll students this year, and the other party welcomed them, but after the application was over, she refused to admit students this year.
This is all because, in the United States, professors can earn a lot of money by applying for their Ph.D. as students.
When the first round of Ph.D. application failed, Lin Qi also learned from his seniors that Yale University organized to invite doctoral graduates who had changed careers to return to the campus to give lectures on career change, and many liberal arts students struggled to graduate with a doctorate, but it was difficult to find faculty and staff to work, and finally they could only be "exiled" to society, give up their academic dreams, and look for a livelihood job.
Lin Qi's academic dreams were shattered and he had no hope of finding a job, so he could only return to China at the last moment of his visa's validity.
After returning to China, Lin Qi began a new round of job searching. She opens the job search software every day and submits resumes without screening, and the "one-click delivery" allows her to submit countless resumes within half an hour.
At this moment, the applicant and the company have reached a different tacit understanding. Lin Qi does not carefully screen companies and positions, and many companies do not look at the resumes they receive, or choose not to read them back.
Part of Lin Qi's resume
Under the sea investment, Lin Qi only received a few interview invitations, and two companies wanted to recruit her, but they did not submit offers because Lin Qi was not a fresh graduate, or the recruitment of personnel was reduced, and there was no full-time position.
On social platforms, Lin Qi swiped a post titled "Yale University Master Looking for a Job but Was Rejected by an Unknown Small Outsourcing Factory", she sensitively clicked in, and sure enough, it was her interview information.
She tried to recall her last interview, but the interviewer was still unsmiling and depressed, and asked about her entrepreneurial experience, Japanese language proficiency, and behavioral interviews. This is a very ordinary interview, and her performance is decent, but under this post, I saw HR comment that she was "too casual".
The interview experience of the professor of the American career guidance course is relaxed, generous, and confident, and Lin Qi tried to put the content of the course into practice, but found that he was not adapted to the soil and water in China.
HR also gave another reason for rejection, believing that high-achieving students will not favor small companies and have strong mobility, but are unwilling to cultivate uncertainties.
The post didn't cause much heat on social platforms, and was quickly drowned in colorful picture and frequency information. It seems that such an example, which is not uncommon, failed to arouse heated discussions among netizens.
Lin Qi went to a consulting company in Shanghai for an interview, and the salary was more than 10,000 yuan. After the first round of written exams, I met with the other three candidates offline. The other three are all from University College London and Nanyang Technological University, and all of them have business backgrounds, and have interned in the "Big Four" (the world's four famous accounting firms) and large factories.
The content of the interview is that the company provides a book of twenty or thirty pages of information, and the interviewers make a PPT together in a short period of time according to the information.
This thin booklet is almost torn, and I don't know how many interviewers have come to apply.
At the end of the second round of interviews, all four interviewees were eliminated. When Lin Qi communicated with them, he learned that they had been looking for jobs since the end of December last year or the beginning of this year, and they had not received a suitable offer until now.
After looking for a job in China for less than a month, Lin Qi felt an insoluble fatigue and just wanted to lie in bed and strike passively.
When Lin Qi felt slack off about job hunting, she unexpectedly received an admission call.
The call came from the owner of the tarot store, and his work content was new media operation, with a monthly salary of 3,000 yuan, including food and accommodation.
Lin Qi agreed, at this time she just wanted to let go of all the external pressure, regardless of doing something that she thought was interesting.
The owner of the tarot shop rented a house as an office and a place to live. In addition to the boss and Lin Qi, the company also has a customer service. The boss is responsible for online live broadcasts, making tarot courses, and helping people with online divination, while Lin Qi is responsible for opening multiple accounts on social platforms to write advertising advertorials, updating horoscopes on this account, and explaining the meaning of tarot cards on another account......
If the account is banned by the platform, it will be quickly cancelled, and a new account will be opened, like playing guerrilla games with the platform.
From 10 to 12 o'clock in the morning and from 7 o'clock in the evening to early in the morning, it is the busiest time for work, especially at night when people often feel emo, and often seek help from metaphysics to enlighten themselves, and 70% of them are relationship problems.
Lin Qi eats and lives with his colleagues and bosses, stays together every day, and the content of his work is closely related to fate, and they share their lives, gains and losses with each other without any guilt.
The boss is in his 40s, has worked hard in the workplace for more than 20 years, and before leaving the company, he was the head of human resources at the Shanghai branch of a Japanese company. Because the company wanted to transfer her to Japan, she simply fired the company squid and came out to start her own business.
No matter what age you are, it seems that there are difficulties in the company, even if you struggle for the company for half your life, you have to find a new way out for yourself in the end.
The boss has been studying and working in tarot side hustles for 18 years, and she opened a tarot studio last year with an annual income of one million yuan. There seems to be no dead end in life.
Lin Qi
Lin Qi asked the boss, judging from her HR experience, would a large factory recruit someone like herself?
The boss shook his head: "No." Big factories don't value people who are strong in individual ability, but want to be good at teamwork. You're too unruly. ”
Before returning to China, Lin Qi married her German boyfriend in the United States. The German boyfriend is studying for a doctorate in the United States, and the visa is a J1 "exchange visitor visa", and Lin Qi can also get a J2 family visa, and he can stay in the United States for up to five years.
Lin Qi can return to the United States through a new marriage, she originally wanted to hide her plans, but the boss said that when she saw her resume, she realized that she would not stay here for long, but it didn't matter, she could stay as long as she could, and the boss didn't mind.
Lin Qi's "casualness", "uncertainty", and "high education" were finally gently picked up by a tarot shop.
Lin Qi with her husband
After leaving the tarot shop, Lin Qi tried to be an unemployed blogger on social platforms and sell his "failure". She found that self-media provided her with a platform to express herself again, and literature embraced her in another form.
Some time ago, Lin Qi went through the formalities and went to the United States again.
In high school, she hoped to find a decent job so that she could not be troubled by her parents, relatives, and outside voices, and that she could immerse herself in the world of literature in her spare time.
After nearly ten years of tossing, she "gave up Porsche and chose to study abroad, gave up buying a house in Tokyo and chose to go to the United States, and gave up a million dowry to marry a foreign man", and returned to the starting point, although she had not found a job, she finally won the support of her parents and husband, and there was no financial pressure for the time being, and she could continue to study literature.
Lin Qi plans to continue looking for a job in the United States, but this time he is much more relaxed, "It doesn't matter if I serve the plate in the United States, I don't need to rely on my main job to prove my social identity, I will insist on expressing myself in the media." ”
Lin Qi's escape path from the workplace is difficult to replicate, but more ordinary migrant workers are still uncontrollably up and down in the job market.
*Lin Qi is a pseudonym, photo provided by the interviewee
(Excerpted from the WeChat public account)