quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

for the rich

xxxxpost - for the record I had a lot of friends at Rutgers who hustled their way into various substantial magazine/newspaper/writing/editing/PR/media jobs including at least one that's a minor "name" in his field. They were generally smart, hardworking and had a clue unlike the twins above. I have no idea whether the Rutgers name helped, hurt or neither though. One disadvantage of Rutgers compared to NYU is that (as far as I know) there isn't some "internship office" at Rutgers that just hooks you up with places - you're on your own. The advantage, however, is the relative lack of debt that allows you to survive while struggling through your first few jobs. Also the closeness to NYC lets you do stuff while in school.

Meantime, while this Sullivan guy stays employed, this:

New York Times to cut 100 newsroom jobs

That's an 8% reduction. The Times will offer buyouts to union and non-union employees, and resort to layoffs if it can't get enough people to leave voluntarily.

One disadvantage of Rutgers compared to NYU is that (as far as I know) there isn't some "internship office" at Rutgers that just hooks you up with places - you're on your own.

My gf just graduated from Columbia and I sorta expected there to be exactly this sort of 'internship office' that was gonna hook her up, but no, the extent of the extra job help is some website with job/internship listings...and I mean, it uses the same software and looks the same as the Berkeley one. (I was expecting it to be way better...)

They're both *okay* and it's nice to have a handful of extra listings (and I know people who have gotten stuff off em) but if you're paying 250k for your education, yeah you'd expect some sort of office that is on top of their shit w/r/t your future. Most of her friends who have jobs just knew people...which is the real benefit of private schools, I guess / the rich kids don't need that office anyway.

yeah i thought the whole thing about going to ivies isnt the intern office its the, you know, your roommate is the niece of barry diller or whatever

yeah exactly

yeah, that hasn;'t really been the case in a couple of generations, altho obv. you will get connected classmates, just not in great numbers. mostly just upper middle class kids from a relatively small group of suburbs ime

^^ yeah, pretty much.

i think u make just about the same connections at any top-50 school.

the other part of it is the alumni network though--in certain fields you cant throw a rock w/out hitting a princeton/columbia/harvard/yale grad--so you seek out ppl who went 2 ur school

I think where you're starting out from also makes a difference in this, though.

yeah

fwiw almost none of her friends seem to be getting by without parental assitance and having gone through the job app process with her, having a columbia degree alone def doesn't open many doors these days.

except the door... to knowledge

xxp - most of my friends were also middle class kids from more middle-american locales. maybe that speaks to an aspect of human nature of seeking out people like oneself, but maybe it's just me being shitty at networking.

i went to a not-really-an-ivy school but not a bad school either--most of my friends were similarly middle class or lmc and none of them in any kind of position to hook ME up with connections...

but i knew of/knew a lot of kids who werent "friends" per se who definitely had those connections, & if i had been more of a snake/better at networking i could have buttered them up and probably had a real job by now

there are def some middle class kids at the ivies (and yeah my gf's friend group is more middle class than the school in general) - but the statistics don't lie, middlle-middle class ppl are a minority at any top50 private school...hell, they're a minority at lots of crappy private schools.

^^ i am partially convinced that Brown admitted me as part of some diversity initiative, so they'd have someone with first hand experience of people who do all their shopping at Wal-Mart.

I practically got paid to go to Sarah Lawrence because we were LOLpoor during my HS years due to mom's health issues (long since resolved) but it's not as if I went there not knowing what fork to use etc. SLC is very heavy on media, the arts and film/TV and prob 250 of the 1000 students there had some kind of network-worthy connection to those professions due to parents, other relatives and family friends but people didn't discuss it up front. A good chunk of the people you'll read about who went there and now direct movies or whatever have family in the entertainment industry. That said, when I graduated and moved over to London a ton of people from the Oxford college affiliated with SLC's JYA program turned out to know people I'd been to college with, greasing the wheels of industry somewhat.

the closest I am at the present to college connections professionally is the program officer at one of the organization i work for's largest funders went to Brown when I did, but I'd rather that guy not remember me. I think I made fun of some project he was involved in in some campus publication, and I thought he was kinda douchey.

oh u went to BROWN well u might as well have just gone to COMMUNITY COLLEGE i mean JESUS

yeah - I considered that i might have been better off going to UC Berkeley, could have had four years' lead time on rent controlled Bay Area apartments.

plus you'd have been there in the era when there was the student who just walked around naked 24/7

SLC is very heavy on media, the arts and film/TV

Even with the v obvious context, years of abbreviating Salt Lake City this way lead me to be like, "Has Salt Lake changed or something? That wasn't my experience with it..." :P

^^ yeah, that was my first thought upon seeing that abbreviation, too!

IME if you're not looking to go into medicine, law, or i-banking, ivy league intern offices are pretty useless

journalism is a pretty good field for ivy-league grads ime

well yeah the dailies at ivies are basically NYT pressure cookers

by "good" i mean "slowly-dying and yet somehow attractive to graduates of our countrys best universities lol"

I see what you did there

the one time I visited a career counselor at my career office...the lady just said "think about what you like to do! then try to find a job doing that! don't give up!"

she also had several empty bottles of wine hidden in the back of her bookshelf

my career counselor was a MFA and published poet

made me feel psyched about pursuing a career as a writer ;_;

if you write good poetry and get published...you too can become a career counselor to undergrads

he has a job = success

one of my grad school classmates left his editing job to come here and says he writes poetry in one of his boring classes. found out today he edited a novel i read last year that made a big impression on me. i don't understand why he left his job!

And the novel was?

the one time I visited a career counselor at my career office...the lady just said "think about what you like to do! then try to find a job doing that! don't give up!"

she also had several empty bottles of wine hidden in the back of her bookshelf

― dyao, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 01:39 (57 minutes ago)

Then she was taking her own advice - she enjoyed drinking and got paid to do it.

This one gets double points for also belonging in the "White People who May Be In Danger" thread:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/in-school-in-debt-and-asking-for-help/

he comes off OK compared to most ny times rich people article subjects

but damn

$100k in loans for a jschool degree

i wonder how much of that is tuition & fees expense, and how much is cost of living though.

how much can the tuition & fees cost? $40k?

i think NYU cost $20k a year when I was applying to college in 1991.

people need to do a little math before grad school ffs

What Velko said. I remain glad as hell I was lucky enough to attend on fellowship.

(Not to NYU, but grad school nonetheless.)

I went to Cheap State University for grad school and paid $900 semester

yeah, i went cheapo for grad school, my relatively small 10k undergrad student loan was burdensome enough for me

solidly middle-class and went to oberlin. and no, i cannot throw a rock without hitting some Obie in the head. however, i tend to like this, as that means we can go get drunk.

i ended up with $6000 of student loans from grad school for the semester I did my thesis (that I'd been putting off for 3 1/2 years) so I could afford not to have a job. I think tuition had gone up to $1300/semester by that point. But the majority of the loans were for cost of living, which was budgeted at far higher than it cost me to live.

table: there is an Obie that occasionally makes me want to throw rocks at his head.

I sure wish cheapo state grad school was still $900 a semester