Our interview with Alfie Lau, a UBC alumnus and journalist by profession, offered us informative insights into both the opportunities and challenges that can face young adults as they transition from post-secondary education into the complex and specialized job markets of the modern economy. Although Alfie completed his undergraduate degree some 20 years ago, many of his stories and experiences remain relevant to our own concerns and aspirations as undergraduate university students in the present day. While youth unemployment and underemployment numbers may have skyrocketed in Canada since the year of Alfie’s graduation in the summer of 1993, our interview revealed that feelings of uncertainty or lack of direction in the transition period from school to work are not an issue reserved only for the millennial generation. As Alfie described to us, his own path from university into his eventual profession was both uncertain and non-linear, a story which both echoes and embodies many of the difficulties now faced by educated young adults in the oversaturated and competitive work environments of 2017.
To construct a more comprehensive understanding of the specific role that university education played in Alfie’s eventual career success as a sports journalist, one of our first questions to Alfie centred on the nature of his career aspirations – or lack thereof – as a first-year student at UBC. Echoing the sentiments of young adults across the generation gap, Alfie described how his first years at UBC were not necessarily driven by aspirations to achieve success in a specific professional field, as he was at that time unsure of his own interests or passions. Rather, Alfie was extremely adamant in expressing how his path through university helped to shape and consolidate his individual strengths, allowing him to explore and discover both his likes and dislikes in different academic and practical fields. By taking a wide array of classes in different disciplines, comprised of varying demographics, Alfie was able to develop a breadth of perspective that augmented the skills and knowledge he acquired in separate but complementary fields of inquiry. He stressed for us the importance of considering education as a grounds from within which to cultivate individual qualities or to connect with other people, listing off the multiple mentors and “soft” skills which he acquired and developed throughout the four years of his undergraduate degree.
As an Arts alumnus, the acquisition of “soft” skills through participation in the latent curriculum at UBC is something that Alfie found to be incredibly important later on in his chosen professional field. As he described to us, qualities like time management, sociability, communication skills, and adaptability, were all inevitably developed through the years of his enrolment at university, and all contributed later on to his success in a diverse and fast-paced industry that tends to reward initiative and flexibility along with reliable, stable performances at work. These types of skills proved invaluable to Alfie in a job market that often inexplicitly functions on the basis of social capital and networking ability in the cultivation of individual opportunities. In many ways, Alfie’s description of his time at UBC stressed the importance of certain facets of UBC’s hidden curriculum over the actual “hard” skills he was taught as an English major, a point which often reoccurs in discussions that centre on the value of an Arts degree in a society that so often paints CEOs and software engineers as the ultimate points of aspiration for ambitious young adults.
While Alfie did consider his university education to have played a fundamental role in his eventual successful entrance into the job market, he was also quite willing to speak about the feelings of uncertainty and trepidation that often accompanied him both during and after his years as an undergraduate student at UBC. He explained to us that while school did provide him with a repertoire of interpersonal skills, it did not necessarily deposit him at the end onto an easy or linear road forward into secure employment. In fact, he described specifically how the months after his graduation were spent in fluctuating periods of under or unemployment, and how his eventual career as a journalist was preceded by 5 years of what he described to us as “soul killing” work in corporate communications. Alfie’s choice to transfer his writing skills (then used to file quarterly reports) to the more exciting and eclectic field of journalism was facilitated by both luck and personal initiative, combined through the multiple opportunities provided by his far-reaching and diverse social network. In making this transition, he was clear that he did sacrifice a certain measure of predictability and financial security to pursue a profession that he ultimately found to be more personally rewarding.
The types of risks or uncertainties that are associated with pursuing ones passions are omnipresent in the competitive job markets of the modern day, and Alfie’s story provides an effective recount of how personal application and a willingness to learn, in combination with a certain amount of luck and pre-existing social capital, can produce individual opportunities for advancement. In closing, Alfie left us with a striking piece of advice that seems applicable to any situation, either within or outside of the educational and professional institutions that shape so many of our interactions throughout the changing years of our lives. Alfie explained to us that an individual’s attitude can drastically effect or alter the nature of their experiences and opportunities both positively and negatively, and one of the greatest skills he brought out of his years as a UBC undergraduate student was an ability to approach new situations with initiative and an open mind. In his own words, successful learning “requires a willingness to just put yourself out there… it’s easy to be 1 of 300 students. It’s much harder to be the one in 300 who speaks out. Find people who are different from you, and learn from them. Those are the people who are going to teach you the most.”