I Don't Want to Grow Up

It's no secret that I'm going kicking and screaming into adulthood, but I just don't understand the mentality of people my age. It seems that people act one way in high school, another way in college, then it seems that the second they graduate they become boring adults. I feel like whenever I talk to someone from school, all people talk about is work. Work takes up a lot of my time, but it's not my main interest or the highlight of my day. It's sad that we have to be defined by our careers. It's the same thing with people in serious relationships, or married. At what point do hobbies and interests take a back seat to career and marriage? I mean I have a full time job, but once I'm done; I'm thinking about records, going to shows, band practice, painting/ drawing, riding my bike, etc... I don't want to seem immature, but why become a boring adult at 24, when you have plenty of time to "settle down" later in life. I want to keep my interests separate from my career. I'd rather talk about owning an original copy of the Clitboys 7", or that I showed my paintings in an art show, than talk about my stupid job.


"why should older mean boring/ why should kids only have fun"- I Object!

Who's gonna help when my body is broken?

As if I haven't complained about my job enough on here... I was supposed to get Health Insurance after working here for 6 months. However, It's more like 8 months by the time it becomes active. Apparently the insurance company needs 30 days to activate, then it has to activate on the first of the month. Rather than being punctual with this matter, and give me the paperwork early; they decided to wait until exactly 6 months had passed and gave me the paperwork a week later. I started on Feb 3, six months from then is Aug 3. My actual insurance won't be active until Oct 3... 2 months late! One of the major reasons I took this job was because I thought it would be nice to have benefits for once, and here it is 7.5 months later and absolutely nothing.

Since our country does not have universal healthcare, a lot of people like me are drawn to crappy companies with good benefits. If benefits packages were eliminated from the employment process, companies may actually have to increase the pay rate. However, the health care industry is so messed up from insurance in the first place, that anyone without insurance can instantly go bankrupt trying to pay bills to stay alive. It's ridiculous that money is actually a deciding factor in saving a life in the first place.

Anyway, lately my stomach's decided that whenever I put food in it that it doesn't want it in there anymore. Which leaves me with annoying cramps, and being afraid to eat much. Because of my stupid job, I'll have to pay for the doctor's visit myself. With insurance it would be $20, but w/o it will be probably in the $100 range (which is over a day's pay).

NO more SPEC work!

I came across No ! Spec yesterday, after talking about some of my recent client troubles at work. In the graphic design industry it seems pretty common that people will try to get you to do work for them without paying you. Speculative work would be a scenario where if you do this one thing, they'll pay you for the next thing. There is no contract or guarantee that more work or payment will come at all. Contests are also this way, in that it cheapens professional designers by having people spend their valuable time working on something with no compensation. As a professional designer, I can potentially be spending my time working on paid client work, or improving my portfolio. By wasting time on jobs with no benefits, it really serves no purpose from my standpoint.
The past few potential gigs I've lost due to artists who will lowball their rates to a ridiculous proportion. I don't think my rates are high at all, and I make them up based on the client, but it seems like clients themselves aren't willing to spend money for quality. I recently got in contact with someone who had wanted me to do an illustration for a t-shirt. We had a few back and forth e-mails, and then he told me that he had no budget to pay me but would give me free shirts and promised more work in the future. This job was also advertised on Craigslist as a "job," if it was advertised as "do stuff for me for free" I doubt anybody would have responded to it.
Clients: If you want quality work done, you're going to have to pay proportionally for it.
Designers: Don't sell yourself short, you cheapen all of us by bowing to the whim of these people. Clients should have to sell themselves to you just as much as you have to sell yourself to them.

Fuck You, Senator!

...a lot of kids don't know what work is. They think work is a four-letter word -Hillary Clinton

Dear Senator Clinton:

My name is Jeff DeSantis, I represent the generation you speak of with no work ethic. My problem with work is not that I feel entitled to a great paying job with no effort, but the fact that I've put forth the effort to no rewards. I went through High School, then to a county college, then to a 4 year state college; I posses a HS diploma, an Associates Degree, and a Bachelors degree. I graduated in 2003, and it took me 2 and a half years to find a job in my field. I wouldn't say I felt I deserved a six figure salary job, but I felt (and still feel) that I was somewhat entitled to a job that would be complimentary to the efforts I had made with my education. I currently have a job, where I am underpaid, that I took in order to gain experience and have it on my resume that I worked full time doing what I went to school for. Jobs don't want people with no work experience, but you can't get experience without a job, so we're all supposed to take low paying jobs in order to get experience. What was college for? I certainly didn't get enough experience to get a job there.

It's not that we expect work or that we think work is something bad, since a child we were told: go to school - go to college - get a job. Now the fact that we have trouble finding jobs, and when we do it's something we don't want to do just so we can pay off our student loans. I bet your daughter didn't go unemployed for 3 months after college because she couldn't find work. I bet she didn't work at a retail job, since her student loan payments were coming up, and she needed money. I'm sure that she found a job right out of college due to her parent's connections. I'm sick of privileged people who've had things handed to them based on who their parents know, turn around and call me lazy because I don't have the same advantages as them.

You say we're lazy, you say we hate work; but we've worked hard and got nowhere, and we see people who just knew the right people have no problems finding their first job within weeks of graduating. I've been through your system, I've done everything we'd been told to get a job, and now when it comes time for the pay off we're thrown scraps. We see no benefit in hard work, and it's not our problem it's the economy and work environment. So, in closing, FUCK YOU SENATOR CLINTON!

Sincerely,

Jeff DeSantis
- Generation Y representative

The big payoff...

As as a follow up to my blog on education, I figured I should talk about where my own personal education and experience has gotten me. After graduating TCNJ with a BFA in Graphic Design, I went 2 and a half months without being able to even get so much as an interview. Then, out of desperation and needing to pay student loans and other bills , I took a job at a small bookstore. I figured I could do this shitty little job while looking for a real job. 2 years later, and not nearly enough interviews later I get laid off due to bad/shady business decisions of my former employer. I enjoy the fruits of unemployment for 6 months, while working a few part time jobs here and there. Then, with 1 month left of unemployment benefits left, I find a full time job. I've been at this job for 4 months now, and still have yet to see anything I've produced actually get made. I feel like I do nothing, since everything I do seems to get wasted. In the grand scheme of things, I've learned that when working 40 hours a week, it's nearly impossible to look for a new job at the same time. And the big payoff is... The transition from shit retail job, to professional graphic designer really only gave me a 3 dollar an hour pay increase. End result being that I can pay off my bills and buy lunch each day, but pretty much do nothing else (and by bills I don't mean rent money, since I can't afford an apartment). A lot of people complain that they're underpaid, I'm about $4 an hour underpaid for what I SHOULD be paid, and more like $10/hr. less than what I WANT to be paid.

So basically, I feel that I got where I am based on my own skills and dedication rather than any outside help from anyone. At no point did TCNJ, or even the Unemployment office help me with finding a job. People who didn't waste their time on school have the benefit of no student loans, plus they didn't waste 4-5 years of their life learning useless subjects, so they are potentially able to enter the "industry" earlier. Basically, nobody's going to do anything for you that doesn't benefit themselves in some way; you have to fend for yourself to get anywhere.

EducationMasturbation

So lately with all the graduation speeches on the news, and my own mother finally graduating college; I've been thinking about the impact and importance we seem to place on education. Myself being a college graduate with an and Associates Degree and a Bachelors Degree in Graphic Design. After graduating college, it took me about 2 and a half years to find a full time job in my field. In a way it leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth in regard to my educational experience.

Could I have gotten a job in my field with just a high school degree? NO, my high school guidance counselor even gave me grief for taking "too many art classes, and no honors classes." While to the average student, I suppose honors level classes look nice on a transcript, however for an artist, obviously your portfolio is graded higher than your academic scores. It seems like the high schools are more concerned with making your learning experience hard, so that college seems easy. I was a B/C/D student in high school, then when I went to college, I miraculously became a A/B student. WHY? What's the point in scaring students into thinking "if high school was this hard, college must be horrible." Maybe if my high school was a little easier, I would have had better grades and more confidence to apply to a 4 year college, rather than the local county college. Plus, the arts departments were ether being demolished to make way for a new cafeteria, or were given PC with no design programs on them. The only function they ever filled was to type out text in MS Word to print and glue on to projects.

Could I have gotten a job in my field with just my Associates Degree? Maybe, but nothing that I would enjoy doing. The teachers at the school were way too old to be teaching graphic design, which is a field which forces you to stay on top of things. By teaching us the extreme basics, and filling our head with pointless outdated knowledge, I feel like I was wasting time. And it turned out I kind of did, since when I transferred, I wound up losing about a year worth of classes. What is the point of tenure for teachers, sure job security is nice, but if you're essentially training a workforce for the job field, then you should be forced to keep on top of things, just like any professional. Now my father is a teacher also, but he's taken classes in graduate study, and goes to seminars to keep up with things, and teaches a basic level class.

Could I have gotten a job in my field with my Bachelors Degree? Potentially yes, however I didn't. I certainly learned a lot about design, but I had little experience and no clue how to search for a job. The experience was by my own initiative to get an internship, and do freelance work, but the average graduate had no experience what so ever. After graduation, my school did nothing to help with the job finding process. I had a nice portfolio, and a resume but no real leads on a job. By the time I actually found a job, my portfolio was outdated, and I barely showed any student work.

Do I regret going to college? No because I learned many skills on the way to my degree, which helped me in the long run. However, a lot of what I learned on my own is what made me have the skill level I have now. I was able to take things further, and am able to adapt to various diverse jobs. I'm still not at my dream point in work, ideally I'd want something that was well organized, busy and allowed me to utilize my skills to their fullest.

Is college necessarily for everyone? Definitely not, I know plenty of people who didn't go to school who make a lot more money than me. Plus they don't have as many student loan bills to worry about, and have been working professionally longer than me. If you're willing to dedicate yourself to get the skills you need without college, you will find that you are judged more on your skills, dedication and abilities in the long run. The stigma that you need to have a degree to so somewhere in life is ignorant, and doesn't apply to everyone's career goals.