Shut the hell up, Scott Nicholson

The NYTimes posted an article about how recent college grads are still having a hard time finding jobs. They focused on Scott Nicholson, a 2008 alumnus from Colgate University, a school that I attended. In the article, he laments about how he had one job offer, but making a paltry $40,000 just out of school wasn’t good enough, so he turned it down.

In case you’ve stumbled here from the Internet, let me get this out of the way: most Colgate graduates are not like that. We’re an exceeding smart, clever and interesting bunch. We’ve got really great alumni like Andy Rooney, Bob Woodruff, Howard Fineman, the guys in Broken Lizard, Chris Paine and Joe Berlinger. Please don’t judge us based on one guy who got interviewed for an article.

Anyway. Let’s take a closer look here. The article says he was the “winner of a dean’s award for academic excellence”. That’s the Dean’s Award, which is given out each semester to students who received a 3.3 GPA or higher. And he won it once. I’m not trying to discredit the work he did at Colgate, but you honestly can’t expect to be given a $75,000/yr job right out of school without being an excellent student, or at least having the right connections. There are tens of thousands of other recent grads out there right now who are more qualified than this kid but who still do not have jobs, so to think that just because you went to a really good school, you can just expect to land your dream job right off the bat. And it more or less says that right in the article. His parents told him that he should have taken the job and that it could have led to other opportunities. Yet even with that knowledge, he still chose to turn it down. Not exactly the smartest move in the world.

Further – and this is the thing that gets the most – by letting himself be featured in an article like this, he’s more or less burned any chances he had of having an actual job. Who’s going to want to hire that guy who was featured in a New York Times article that portrayed him as being overly entitled?

So Sorry, Scott Nicholson, but you brought this on yourself. Best of luck in finding a job.