My brother recently landed his first bona fide job as a graphic designer, having freelanced for several years. Our family is thrilled for him, obviously, but he was a little moody about one point:
“I only got the job because of my friend, though,” he said. “If he wasn’t there, then there’s no way I would have had a shot.”
I had to smile at this. Growing up in the wealthy suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut, we saw plenty of this when we were younger.
It was the classic internship game: it was always about who you knew, not what you knew. After all, interns rarely never know anything. What they do know (or, rather, who their families know) is other people.
And so it often went for first jobs out of college, especially for me and my friends, departing the enclave of our liberal arts campus after four years of education only to discover that practically, we knew very little about the world.
My first office job out of college, as a Marketing Assistant in the academic publishing division of Oxford University Press, came directly from an internship the previous summer. Where did that internship come from? From someone I new through college, of course—how else?
Like my brother, I would love to see a world where merit matters more than connections, but it’s hard to imagine what that looks like.
The very least we can do is shift our shame into a more useful place, resetting it as an acknowledgment of our inherent privilege—however those privileges may have been accrued, whether through the circumstances of our birth or the various subsequent lucks in life.
And, hopefully, when it comes time for us to do the hiring, to do our utmost to look beyond who we know.
Taylor Coe 