Young, educated and scared: a student’s perspective on career anxiety

Impressions – my diary presents the anxieties of a Humanities student about career opportunities in the field.

I am a final year student studying towards a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology and Media Studies. There was an annual career expo held on campus lately. This expo was said to be meant for students across all Faculties; at least the campus career centre told me so. However, when I attended the expo I found out that there was an extremely limited number of companies that had anything to do with Humanities. I felt undercatered for and almost embarrassed to be there. Most students across faculties do not even know that this expo is meant for anyone else except commerce students. I know this because students kept on asking me: “Hey, what are you doing here, are you not doing a BA?”.

As an Arts student I feel that I am excluded from the career expo. There is nothing being done – at least through the career expo – to try to bridge the skills gap between the Arts students and their kind of workplace. There are companies like Anglo that present Engineering and Science with careers in their kind of workplace.

In my case, I was told at the campus career centre that the Humanities-relevant companies were there. First National Bank was quoted as an example by the receptionist. There is a dense focus on commerce and I understand that companies like Oasis (who are said to recruit Arts students) are actually rearing them towards commercial business work. It is also important to recognize that if Arts students wanted to go into commerce, they would study Commerce. I am not enrolled in a BA because I could not reach the entry level requirements of a Commerce degree or because I am less intelligent. I am passionate about the Social Sciences.

It provokes concern that the campus career centre emphasizes that there is no problem; that companies that are specific and relevant to Arts careers are actually there at the expo. I cannot agree that I became blind on the day of the expo because this is not the case. It looks like my university has taken the trend of magazines such as Careers SA where the focus is Commerce, Engineering and Science. It is a misleading belief that companies relevant to Humanities students attend the expo when they actually do not.

I personally believe that this is a vast denial. It means that we (Humanities students) remain deprived of knowledge about the careers that we can embark on. I believe that as long as courses such as Journalism, Media Studies, Industrial Sociology, International Relations, Digital Arts, Fine Arts, Philosophy, Literature are offered at Wits, there should be a way that the problem of skills is also addressed in relation to these fields of study. Most of us do not know MOST of the careers that we can pursue with our Arts degrees (and I use ‘We’ because I have been speaking to my fellows, those I know personally and those that are distant fellow students). I believe that the relevant companies can be able to better inform us about the different types of careers that we can embark on as Humanities students. This will probably also reduce the amount of anxiety that Humanities students go through while obtaining their degrees. It is important to note that we Humanities students are not spending three years or more in this institution so that we can get basically any job because we can work in any ‘environment’, but we also have career foci that I believe the career centre and the expo should be addressing.

It is enough that we Humanities students can barely get bursaries to get our undergraduate degrees. Yes our career foci and skills shortage may not be a focus in this country right now but I expect it to be a priority to an institution that offers and teaches me the course. I want to know what the Counselling and Careers Development Unit (CCDU) and Wits are doing to bridge the skills gap among Humanities students as the career expo remains biased and unfair. If they can do it for the other faculties, surely they can do it for the Humanities students as well. We cannot be left to ‘swim’ for ourselves with no guide when the others have guides in the same sea.

This issue needs to be addressed and can be life-changing for most Humanities students. Right now we are young, educated and scared.

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