This First Person column is written by Madeline Buss, who lives in Vancouver. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
As I rode the bus home after a long day of work, I scrolled through my phone, rifling through the piles of LinkedIn acceptance posts where my classmates had attached images of various impressive corporations, declaring that’s where they’d be spending their summer.
Meanwhile, I was covered in a bizarre mixture of grease and sweat — a concoction exclusive to those employed in the restaurant industry.
I’m working two service industry jobs this summer, splitting my approximately 60-hour weeks 60/40 as a restaurant supervisor and a café waitress. Unlike my classmates, I won’t make a LinkedIn post to declare these jobs.
Don’t get me wrong. I like my jobs. I feel fulfilled after each shift knowing I’ve put in the hours to have an exhausting but productive day.
Yet when I lie in my bed with my eyes barely open, I humour the lingering sensation of FOMO — the fear of missing out on career opportunities in my line of work.
I’m 19, have just finished my second year working toward an economics degree and I live in Vancouver — for the moment. It’s an expensive city.
The previous summer I had taken an internship in the finance sector and got a taste of living a downtown corporate lifestyle. I made connections with people who’d been through degrees like my own and who wanted to share their insight and experience with me.
Even though my internship hadn’t covered my basic food and rent expenses, I accepted the job offer because I had several years of savings from working in restaurants throughout high school. My family had also pitched in to help cover this exciting opportunity.
This year though, I didn’t have enough savings to lean on. I also didn’t want to continue to rely on my parents. Living across the country from my family was my choice, not my parents’, living in an expensive city was my choice, not my parents’, attending a school where the tuition is one of the highest in the country was my choice, not my parents’.
As the eldest daughter who is aware of the reality of financial hardship created in my family by divorces and health scares, I know there’s a limit to how much money my parents can offer me without causing them some strain, and that’s OK.
That’s why when my former employer reached out, saying they’d hoped I would have been interested in coming back and wondering why I hadn’t, I felt frustrated.
I didn’t say explicitly, “I’ve chosen this route because it’ll allow me to continue living in the city.”
Perhaps this would have been too harsh a comment for a run-of-the-mill checkup email. Plus, I didn’t want to admit to a superior that I might be approaching some kind of financial distress. I didn’t want to create a bubble of “woe-is-me” and force a sympathetic response from someone whose respect I’d tried so hard to earn.
People will make up their minds in whichever way they see fit. When my peers asked why I was working a restaurant job, I would quickly offer a qualifier, to make it clear my lack of internship isn’t because I wasn’t good enough to get an internship.
Sometimes, I can feel they don’t believe me. But I know that the people closest to me will respect me and my decisions as long as they make me happy. My desire is to be financially independent. I’ve taken on student loans to pay for tuition fees already and don’t want to continue indebting myself.
While I know full well that there are valuable job skills to be learned from the restaurant industry, I have my doubts that the transition to a different lifestyle will be smooth. How will I eventually transition out of serving, hosting and managing tips into a world of networking, typing and calculating? Will I still be able to support myself when I make that transition, especially when it’s never been harder for young people to find jobs? The unemployment rate for people my age is scarily high. I wish internships for students were better paid.
Canada lost 17,000 jobs in May, pushing up the unemployment rate for the first time since last August. The change is primarily driven by the loss of jobs among youth aged 15 to 24.
Or better yet, I wish these internships and jobs would at least pay a salary that matches the rising costs of living. In fact, many minimum wage earners can’t afford a one-bedroom unit in Toronto or Vancouver without spending more than 30 per cent of their income. It is a privilege to be able to take advantage of internship opportunities.
I worry that I won’t be able to reach my full potential.
Recently, I had a friend tell me that this phase will just be an extra chapter in our autobiographies.
I choose to believe that’s the truth and the hard work I put in now will benefit me, no matter that it’s not a straight line to my desired goal and a future employer will see the gumption it took to make this risky but financially responsible move.
The question remains whether internships are really imperative, and I suppose I’ll be a case study on the matter.
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