Work Experience - Student: a Rant

I hate to make a post to rant about things that are only semi-Disney related on this blog, but this needed to be said. This post is about to become very opinionated very quickly, so if you consider going to school to be a "job," you may not want to read on. (Disclaimer: This post is not about anyone in particular, but rather it is about my generation as a whole. Please do not be offended by this post.)

Being a student does not qualify as work experience. There, I said it. If your LinkedIn profile lists "student" under work experience, you're doing something wrong. (On LinkedIn there is a section for education, which is where being a student would go.) If you fill out a survey about yourself, and answer "My job right now is being a student," to the question, "Where do you work?" you are doing something wrong. (Now, don't get me wrong, if you answered "I don't have a job at the moment," that is fine. I don't know your whole situation, maybe you recently lost your job, or maybe you've been trying to find one but nothing's come along. That answer is reasonable. But if you write that being a student is your job, know that I will judge you.) 

Logistically, being a student is not a job. Dictionary.com defines "job" as "a post of employment." "Employment" is defined as "an occupation by which someone earns a living." How on Earth do you earn a living as a student? Oh wait, you don't. You can't earn a living as a student, because it isn't a job. In fact, most people pay to be a student rather than get paid themselves, so being a student is almost an acronym to having a job.

Now sometimes people who classify their position as students as a "job" will try to defend themselves by saying something along the lines of: "It's basically a job. I'm in school for x hours a week. I have x hours of homework. I'm learning all of these skills that I'll need when I graduate, blah, blah, blah." Let's compare my "work" as a student to my work as a Museum Assistant, shall we? Alright, so I'm in school for 12.5 hours per week. I work for 20.5 hours per week, assuming I work my regular schedule without picking up any extra shifts, and that it is winter hours at the museum, which it currently is. This means that the number of hours I spend at my job is almost double what I spend at school. As for homework? College students are supposed to learn time management. I used to work at Staples (Monday through Friday from 4-9:30 PM) and I had my homework done. I didn't have much of a life, and there were times where I had the bare minimum of homework done, but the point is that I did it. This was all made possible by time management and maturity. If my Thursday went from having class from 8 AM to 2 PM and work from 4 to 9:30 PM, do you know what I would do after class? HOMEWORK. Do you know why? Because that's the responsible thing to do. If my options at 10 PM when I would arrive back at school were go out because that's apparently what college kids do on Thursdays, or do homework so I don't fall behind on my schoolwork, I would chose the latter. I don't think this is so difficult. As for learning the skills needed after you graduate, this is true, but do you know where I learn the most about working in museums? At my job... at a MUSEUM. I can take all of the History classes I want to, and to be honest my Applied History class this semester is extremely helpful in terms of looking for work after graduation. However, the bulk of my experience and knowledge about my future career path I have learned, as been from my work experience. 

Basically what I'm getting at here, is that the term "student" should never be classified as a job and/or work experience. Being a student is something that you pay to do in order to earn a degree which will eventually get you an actual job. Even if you don't have a regularly scheduled job, just put your last internship or volunteer experience, or something on your LinkedIn. I don't care that you're dishing out money for school and not working even though you're in your twenties and have no excuse not to be, and frankly, I would guess that prospective employers feel the same way. 

Now to relate this to Disney, since this is my Disney blog: Thankfully, I've found a bunch of girls I'm very excited about (hopefully) living with assuming I am accepted into the Disney College Program. Without them, I might still be looking through the surveys everyone posts on the DCP Facebook page. When someone writes that being a student is their job, I instantly lose respect for you. That isn't your job, for the reasons I've just gone over, and the fact that you've actually worded this scenario as such in your survey makes me want to forget I ever started reading your post. Perhaps I'm wrong for judging people I don't know, but I can't help it. Being a student is not a job, and if you think it is, then well, we probably won't be friends.

That is all.

-end rant.-