"Can I graduate? Can I look in the faces that I meet? Can I get my punk-ass off the street I've been living on for so long?" the rock group Third Eye Blind demanded to know in their song Graduate from 1998.
Good questions but the better query might be whether today's college, university and high school graduates are heading into their convocations this spring with less or more trepidation than their proud parents did.
The answer is right about the same.
The celebration of an educational rite of passage always brings with it the uncertainty and anxiety of what's next? Where do I go from here?
Gone are your familiar hallways, your classroom routines, the faces you trust, the shadows you fear. Suddenly, everything's new for you.
Of course, that's a blessing, too, but it doesn't seem like one in the moment, does it? The mood of graduation day doesn't match what's really going on. It's a celebration of intelligence and academic accomplishment, quickly followed by your term in purgatory, where you'll be the naive, inexperienced rookie in a new workplace. And that's if you're one of the lucky ones. If you have the worse fate (only in the short-term, so don't despair) of job hunting in a challenging market, approach all prospective employers with confidence and enthusiasm. They can't wait to meet you.
CNC graduates received their diplomas last week, UNBC hands out its degrees today and local high schools will be calling Grade 12 students onto the stage in the coming days.
The fortunate few of you already have jobs and/or further educational opportunities in your future. As the corporate participants in the Canada North Resource Expo, which runs today and tomorrow at CN Centre, know all too well, finding talented, ambitious young people interested in resource development careers can be difficult. For you graduates, it's a great time to be looking for work in Prince George and across the B.C. Interior.
Yet some of you, like your parents and their parents before them, have greater ambitions than just what's in front of your nose. You want to show friends and family that you've outgrown sleepy old Prince George and you can succeed in the broader urban environments of Vancouver or Calgary or Toronto. When you come home to visit and you're stopped in the mall and asked "where ya been?," you will proudly reply "somewhere."
And so many of you don't want a job - that's for lesser people with smaller minds. You want a career. You want your employment to have significance, to mean something more than a paycheque and a means to a roof over your head, food in the fridge and a vehicle in the driveway. Some of you with more practical outlooks will embrace with joy the ridiculous amounts of money available in the mining or oil and gas sector in this region but many others will go out looking for something more than a wage.
Your passionate idealism shouldn't be mocked. It is from minds like yours that Google and Microsoft and Facebook were born. Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't go to school to help them find jobs. They went to school to learn how to change the world and, if they got rich from it, all the better.
Sound like someone you know?
Is that person facing you in the mirror?
Inside the minds of this year's graduating class are some ideas that will change the world, maybe for everyone or maybe just for one person. Maybe it will bring you fame and fortune or maybe it will just be the right thing for you to do.
Whatever job, career or educational path awaits you, local graduates, may you pursue it with the tireless zeal of youth.
Now get your punk-asses out there and make it happen.
