Confessions of a Cat-holic (52)

These were the people I was surrounded with in SPCC, a bunch of prodigies who accelerated their studies and finished their masters at an age before I entered college. Why did it look so much like the profile of Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory? Did I aspire to be like them? Er.....no.....why?

But Maxim came to our meeting not to show off his academic excellence or premature scholastic achievements. I thought he was returning to his high school to brag about his success and overachievements, or to tell us a tale that someone like us could never dream of attaining.

To my surprise, he said if he could do it again, he wouldn't have worked so hard.

He said he never slept more than 3 hours a day in his college years so he could finish all the academic credits required for early graduation.

And he did successfully graduate on an accelerated track, in a school as academically rigorous as MIT, only to find out that he was not employed anywhere in United States. He confessed that he had sent across his resumes to around 800 employers within 8 months upon his graduation but he was rejected everywhere. By the time his OPT expired, he still could not possibly find an employer to sponsor his H1B visa so he was kicked out of the country involuntarily. He was shocked, disappointed and desperate that for all the hard work he devoted his life into, he could not retain any monetary returns. And when he was dislodged from the states, everything was back to square one. Apart from pride and a handful of diplomas from one of the most prestigious universities in the world, he had nothing.

When we asked him the reasons for his failed attempts of getting employed in America, he confessed that the feedback he got from the employers was that he was overqualified for the jobs he applied. With two engineering undergraduate degrees and an applied physics master, he was considered "too smart" for a layman's job. He said he wouldn't try a phd program anymore, since he was afraid of further sunk costs of investing in education.

Actually, if I were him, I would have doubled down on his studies in academia and maybe become a professor later. If all he was good at was studying, he might as well just stay in the ivory tower and never get out.

Nevertheless, here were a few things that I learned from the fellowship meeting.

I figured that average Joe in SPCC sucked at people's skills. They might be excellent in applying Newton's laws, cracking codes or solving equations. But they were almost clueless when it came to reading others' underneath intentions and getting into others' heads. In short, they were just not street smart. It was not hard to observe that once they left the ivory tower, they could be experiencing unprecedented failures, which could rip them to shreds. All they ever wanted was a high paying salaried job, and a secure one too, with timely payments of remuneration that involved no fluctuations. Ideally, it could be a chartered professional, like an accountant in big 4, a software engineering job at Oracle, a programmer at Google, or a managerial job at Apple, etc. The last thing they wanted was anything that sounded as risky or insecure as commissioned jobs such as insurance brokerage, a real estate agent, or anything related to business or sales. They frowned upon intangible titles like marketing, journalists, business development, sales, merchandising, trading, securities dealing, customer service representatives, receptionists, event managers, public relations, secretary, administrative assistants, tutors, etc. They studied so hard their entire life not for those low-end jobs. They wanted prestige. They wanted to be respected. They wanted to be seeked, not to seek. They wanted to be served, not to serve. They wanted stability and job security. They wanted technicalities.

Another thing I learned from his anecdotes was that America did not reward elitism or academic excellence. On paper, he looked perfect with a magna cumme laude. But that was exactly why he couldn't get employed anywhere in America, a country that prided itself for its abundance of jobs and opportunities.