Hello, AUCians – Welcome to the Real World!

Why are you attending university?

You want to get a Bachelor’s degree. You want to facilitate finding a job. You want to learn. You want to experiment. You are conforming to a social norm. You are building an array of connections. You are passing the time.

No judgement, here.

Whatever your reasons are or even if you do not have any at the moment, allow me to take a few minutes of your time and clarify some common misconceptions about the world you are going to encounter once you walk out of the AUC gates.

AUC graduates are not as special as they used to be some 20 years ago. Back then, other than AUC, there were only public universities. Later, a bunch of private universities opened and many students who did not academically qualify for AUC attended them.

Now with rising tuition fees, numerous academically advantaged students attend universities – such as the German, British, and French – and they are equally as smart and qualified, if not more at times.

A Bachelor’s degree is not at all special. With a youth bulge in Egypt, there are plenty of those. And with a simple supply and demand equation, the degree is not going to guarantee you a job. This is why many are now opting to pursue Masters’ degrees. And in some five to ten years, there are going to be plenty of those, too.

GPAs are overrated. After a few years in the job market, your university education is going to be a footnote on your CV. Unless you want to pursue an academic career, your GPA is not that important.

What you are doing now is not necessarily what you are going to be doing five to ten years down the line.

It is normal to roam around after graduation for some two to three years between jobs to try and find your calling. And there is no law that forces you to only work or do what you have studied as an undergraduate. You can easily land a job that has nothing to do with your degree.

You might think I am being quite cynical, here. Consider this a wake up call. And I am not going to leave you hanging. Here are a few pointers.

Your skills are the key to landing a decent job. I was once interviewed by an eighty-something-year old. He told me: you spread yourself too thin and you are not specialized in anything. He is old school and the job market has surpassed specialization.

With a youth bulge, an increasing number of Bachelor’s degree holders, and tight budgets, employers are looking for people who can do a lot of things. Put yourself in their shoes, why employ three specialized individuals when you can employ one who does all their tasks?

AUC offers a unique extra-curricular experience. Utilize it. You never know what is going to come out of it. The best job I ever had was as an investigative reporter for a newly founded magazine published by one of Egypt’s biggest private journalistic institutions. I never studied journalism.

In fact, I actually found my passion for it as an activity in my graduating semester.

The Egyptian and Middle Eastern job market are often criticized for their adherence to wasta – nepotism. The West has a formal, institutionalized version of wasta. They call it “recommendation letters”. Regardless, wasta only facilitates your entry to an otherwise exclusive club.

Your success there, however, will only depend on your performance. If you perform inadequately, they might keep you on for the sake of your wasta; but you are not going to grow in pay or position.

Have your parents or professors ever criticized you for being immature? Maturity is not equal to age or even experience. Maturity is realizing that you cannot have everything you want. Maturity is making a choice between two things you want and living with not having one of them.

As a university student, you are not demanded to be mature in that sense. In fact, it is encouraged that you pursue everything that crosses your mind. After all, you will never have the luxury to do so ever again.

And if there is anything that should be remembered out of all of this, it is that regardless of how much you carefully plan, you really do not have much control.

There are so many variables in life and we, as humans, only have control over very few of them.

So, face it all head on. You never know where it is going to lead you.

But, have no regrets. And as Winston Churchill would say, “if you are going through hell, keep going.”