Apathy Sketchpad

I was assurred years ago that physics was a good employable degree. Don’t worry, I was told, you don’t have to get a job related to your degree. It shows you can put the work in and get a result. It shows commitment. It shows that you can learn something and pick up skills. Blah blah blah.

Today I discover this is a lie.

If I want to apply for the job of website designer, what do I need? Why, that would be a website design degree. If I want to write software I’m expected to have a degree in that, and if I want to design kitchens I need a kitchen design degree. I don’t know why I would want to design kitchens; I have no intrest at all in them, but it’s a good example of a job demanding a degree that nobody in the world will have.

This is, of course, the problem with these degrees. I know a man with a degree in greenkeeping. That opens up approximately four only incrementally different jobs to him, but it closes them off somewhat from everyone with a proper degree, because why would you hire someone with a degree in chemistry when there’s someone with a degree in precisely the job you have advertised?

What am I supposed to do? Be a physicist? Alright, so I’m clearly qualified for it, but it would mean working with physicists, and four years of being at university with them was quite enough for me. It’s rather disspiriting applying for a job you know you don’t meet the stated requirements for, but it’s the only way to get any job at all, especially when it was the computer science A-level that put me off the idea in the first place. That was mostly outdated, idealised nonsense that had nothing to do with any computer I’ve ever seen. You learnt it, and then were examined on it, and then tried very hard to forget it before you accidentally mentioned it to someone who actually knows about computers and looked like an idiot.

Taking the web design as an example: clearly I can design websites. I have two. Some people don’t have that many ears! But how am I supposed to convince someone of this in an interview? I’m terrified that the degree courses will teach you words I don’t know for things I do:
“So, do you mind if we ask you a few questions to assess your knowledge of HTML?”
“Go ahead.”
“What is the Carnegie Principle in the context of Front And Back Extrusion?”
“Come again?”
Then I go home and Google it and it turns out to mean “make sure you use the American spelling of ‘centre’ in align tags” or something else equally obvious and I’ve just told the interviewer I didn’t know it.

So now I’m stuck with a degree nobody wants, skills nobody will ever know about, and no job. Great.