Stop Giving Millennials a Bad Name

Okay, Matthew Klein with the New York Times, I’m not sure I understand what you have to complain about in your recent Op-Ed article from March 20th, “Educated, Unemployed and Frustrated”. You (obviously) have a freelance situation with one of the biggest news organizations in the world. Not only that, but at the bottom of your editorial it says you are a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. I think it is safe to say you may hear your friends plights regarding the current state of jobs for Millennials but you personally can't gripe too much. And before you start comparing the United States' under employed Millennials to those leading the revolutions in the Middle East, I have a few corrections to some of your thoughts:

“My generation was taught that all we needed to succeed was an education and hard work. Tell that to my friend from high school who studied Chinese and international relations at a top-tier college. He had the misfortune to graduate in the class of 2009, and could find paid work only as a lifeguard and a personal trainer. Unpaid internships at research institutes led to nothing. After more than a year he moved back in with his parents.”

You cannot even compare the unrest in the Middle East to the Millennials unemployment rate in the US. Most of those young students in the Middle East would cherish the opportunity to be a personal trainer and a lifeguard. At least their bills are being paid and those jobs, while they are not glamorous, are respectable.

“The cost of youth unemployment is not only financial, but also emotional. Having a job is supposed to be the reward for hours of SAT prep, evenings spent on homework instead of with friends and countless all-nighters writing papers. The millions of young people who cannot get jobs or who take work that does not require a college education are in danger of losing their faith in the future. They are indefinitely postponing the life they wanted and prepared for; all that matters is finding rent money.”

Yes, having a job is a reward for the work you did from Kindergarten through your senior year of college, but just because we all aren’t working in a corner office with a view right out of school does not mean we have lost faith in our future. If anything it has personally driven me to seek out what it is I want to do with my life. Maybe journalism was my dream but dreams can change with circumstances, and I’m not saying I’m giving up completely but I can alter my dream of a newsroom position to more of a content strategist for a growing business or even marketing and PR.

Millennials may have a less than desirable jobs, and we may not be able to purchase a quaint little ranch with a white picket fence but we can afford to pay rent at a pretty snazzy residence and enjoy life with continuing aspiration and drive to find that ultimate career. So please (Matthew Klein's of the world) stop making us seem ungrateful and whiney to future employers, if potential bosses believe we all think like you we will inevitably get passed on for our biggest competitor, the recently laid off baby boomer.