13 ms·

From Graduate School Student to Amazon Warehouse Janitor

37 points by davesailer 8y ago

Topgamer7 8y ago
So many English grads, so few jobs.
dannylandau 8y ago
She is a good writer. Probably could get a job as content creator at most start-ups and large companies. I wonder if she ever considered this path, unless I'm missing something.
- matt4077 8y ago
  Rightly or wrongly, she may have been put off by the lack of respect for the humanities so prevalent within the startup scene. Point of evidence: the gradual replacement of the term "author" with "content creator".
  - vonseel 8y ago
    Point of evidence: the gradual replacement of the term "author" with "content creator". Your point is only one possible logical reason for why he would use the term "content creator" instead of author. Perhaps "content creator" is simply the term his previous employer used for authors. My previous employer called them "technical writers", I am not sure what the marketing department called their writers. Would that make me dismissive of her degree or the humanities in general?
  - PeterisP 8y ago
    "Author" is a more specific term - there are many jobs that require ability to write well, but it doesn't involve any creation of original work or much choice of expression(as an author would), and it's entirely accurate to say that you're creating content according to your employers needs but you're not really an author or copywriter. E.g. writing summaries of other authors, semi-structured product descriptions, part of highly normative technical writing, and even fake reviews (it's a whole industry...) or astroturfing.
  - solatic 8y ago
    > Point of evidence: the gradual replacement of the term "author" with "content creator". Please tell me more about "corporate authors" and why such a term doesn't denigrate the literary contributions of authors of traditionally published poetry and prose. Or do newspapers disrespect the humanities by calling their authors "journalists"? "Op-ed contributors"?
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    My experience has been that, in SF startup culture, respect for the humanities is pretty strongly expressed. But not in the "I have a degree in writing" sense but the overwhelming belief that one must be a sort of Renaissance Man and be an artist or creator of some sort. It makes sense, actually. For many people in the culture, they're fairly comfortable (founders are few, employees many) and so they start looking up Maslow's pyramid.
- solatic 8y ago
  She works in San Marcos, TX and takes the bus to work (per the article). It's close-ish to Austin, but I doubt there are very many large companies and startups in San Marcos.
fullshark 8y ago
This person seems to think they are entitled to a living in art/poetry just because they got a graduate degree in it. Degrees don't ensure employment, marketable skills do, and we should not mislead students to this fact.
- TAForObvReasons 8y ago
  > I had pushed for a college education, believing that with it came job security and the freedom to pursue my writing without the burden of poverty. Without familial wealth or a serendipitous set of circumstances, I would need at least a degree to be competitive if I wanted to move up and over the poverty line. This is a line sold to millions of students in all fields of study. You may be unsympathetic, but given the systemic promotion of higher education over the last few decades it's easy to understand why she would believe the degree would be the ticket to an opportunity in the field of study.
- vonseel 8y ago
  I wouldn't go that far. I read the article in full, and it's an interesting description of the world behind the things many of us take for granted (Amazon, etc.) as well as some commentary on the author's own life journey. It sounds like she expected it to be easier to find a REAL job with a degree - teaching, creative writing, etc. - only to be surprised at the lack of opportunities for "non-professional graduates". My parents strongly urged all of their children to pursue professional, specific degrees: engineering, law, medicine, or accounting/finance. They reinforced time and time again that "liberal arts degrees" provided fewer career options, and to put it plainly, that I would probably end up broke if I chosen that path. I don't think they would have provided financial support to study something like, for example, music. Or even psychology, for that matter, unless the goal was to be a PhD/academic. I agree with your points, however, that degrees do not guarantee employment and we should not mislead students. Too many students think "degree = job". Having observed the Norwegian education system from afar (Norwegian mother & family), I advocate the way they do it and the way many Europeans have vocational programs and opportunities for technical training as an alternative to university. Even the janitors in Switzerland may train for as much as 3 years ( see https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/swiss-skills_training-to-be-the-best--champion-apprentices/41043876 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/swiss-skills_training-t... ). Although, I do not know how that would work in the American culture, where tradesmen typically are not respected and do not make as much money as engineers and the like. Income inequality is a much bigger problem here than in some of the Scandinavian and European countries. TLDR: degree != job, if paying for degree, get a technical one (engineering), accounting/finance, or legal/medical. Make good grades. Grades are more important in some professions than others. Don't expect to get a job with a liberal arts degree.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 8y ago
This is the dark underbelly of education/academia. Selling worthless dreams to young people on credit. If we didn’t have a perverse glorification of education in this country, we’d give the education industry the scrutiny and malign it deserves. (We go after pawn shops and pay day lenders but at least they provide valuable liquidity.) And there is also an oft-missed social justice aspect to all this. Professors and teachers are disproportionately white (and by definition, college-educated): https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61. We sell education as a way to overcome the legacy of systematic oppression of certain minority groups, but we are actually creating quite a large wealth transfer from disadvantaged minorities to college-educated white people. And members of these minority groups aren't seeing the pay-off from paying their tithes to the educational establishment. As the author notes in the article: > A 2014 study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research revealed that an incredible 55.9 percent of black recent college graduates were “underemployed” and working in a position that didn’t require a four-year college degree.
- Judgmentality 8y ago
  > If we didn’t have a perverse glorification of education in this country Is this true? I suspect large swathes of this country detest education. Nobody seems to be voting for better funding of schools - hell look at Oklahoma where school is only open 4 days a week. And that's an entire state! https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/with-state-budget-in-crisis-many-oklahoma-schools-hold-classes-four-days-a-week/2017/05/27/24f73288-3cb8-11e7-8854-21f359183e8c_story.html?utm_term=.2fbf46a9e73f https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/with-state-bu... While there are certainly people that champion education in this country, there are many that condemn it.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    We outspend almost everyone else on education: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-glob... Our post-secondary education spending (college and above) is the highest in the world, and 80% higher than the OECD average. Oklahoma spends about $8,000 per student per year on K-12 education. If it were a country, it would fall between Italy and Spain on that statistic.
matt4077 8y ago
I remember (mis)using the local bookstore as my personal library during my childhood (late 80s, early 90s). The proprietor was somewhat in the mold of this author, and I learned a lot both from her as well as other patrons who stopped by, chatting, drinking copious amounts of free coffee, and buying books. In other words: it was one of those places that served far more purposes than just the economic one of distributing letters on dead trees. Then Amazon came along, and it was obviously far better, in many respects: suddenly, I had easy access to foreign language books, for one thing. But, less obviously, other benefits were lost. Mostly those that escape measurement by econometrics. Not just in terms of squeezing all there is out of people that are suddenly the subject of the economic force of an employer the size of Amazon. Small stores, within walking distance, i. e. the traditional "downtown" is gone, and with it all chances of surreptitiously meeting anyone from the mayor to your neighbour. It's all online now, or sometimes a big-box store outside of town within a barren cultural desert of parking lots and lots. But the argument is hard to make: why (and how) should anyone forgo cheap prices, or the comfort of intensely personal transport, for my vague yearning of community? And so it will continue, the better future, as imagined by Kafka and brought to the big screen in Wall-E. (presented here mostly as an alternative to the inevitable gloating of STEM majors over the failure of others to find a place in the world catering to their strengths and interests.)
- deogeo 8y ago
  > I remember (mis)using the local bookstore as my personal library during my childhood Did you not have a public library where you lived?
- neetdeth 8y ago
  Regarding that last point: It carries the assumption that people in STEMMFT (science technology engineering math medicine finance and the trades) do not have strengths and talents in other areas that they set aside to pursue their careers. Our society seems to have no problem taking a rational approach to something like, for example, basketball. Unless you are one of a few truly phenomenal people with the talent and drive to succeed professionally, playing basketball is a hobby. Full stop. You can count on coaches to (mostly) objectively advise you as to whether or not you are one of those people. Not so, the liberal arts. What was intended as a program of enculturation for the children of the wealthy elite has turned into a monster that devours the children of the working class, who are mostly not exceptional, and for whom an arts degree is an expensive diversion at best.
dvt 8y ago
I'm going to go against the grain here and say that the argument that only "marketable" skills are valuable is a farce. The United States is a cultural black hole and this article exemplifies why. Engineering, the STEM fields, and tech are also cultural wastelands. This is a major issue for me -- and one of the reasons I'm trying to get out of tech. Even if we ignore the fact that some of our greatest thinkers often had "non-marketable" proclivities (Newton was also an Anglican theologian, Einstein worked as a patent clerk, Bertrand Russell wrote poetry, C.S Lewis was an author, etc.), there's something deeply human about being able to put pen to paper. But, for whatever reason, we are losing sight of why poetry, music, and art is valuable. This is a wide-ranging problem and no one seems interested in fixing it.
- fullshark 8y ago
  > But, for whatever reason, we are losing sight of why poetry, music, and art is valuable. Everyone thinks those things are valuable, but due to nearly costless distribution of media the very best in their field can distribute their art to the entire world and we can enjoy it. It's a market that lends itself to superstar economics now, like spectator sports stars. As a consumer of art, it has never been easier to enjoy and appreciate it.
- travisoneill1 8y ago
  Marketable just means somebody will pay you for it. All of your examples were extremely marketable. The fact is that since poetry, art, and music scale so well, we only need a few professionals and therefore only truly exceptional people can do it. Why does a mediocre artist somehow have more value than a mediocre basketball player, for example?
- mitchellst 8y ago
  Yes, life is bigger than commerce. But your comment makes me wonder, "then, whose art should we value?" It's not that the US doesn't value art— highbrow or low brow, we have some of the finest museums of visual arts and the biggest of big-hair country music. We (more than) adequately finance both. Our resources, time, attention, and interest are finite, so how do you propose we choose whom to pay for their art? By MFA degree? School ranking? Random lottery? Honestly, I'm sympathetic to the author, not least because I think there's some irony in the piece. She recalls mournfully the time she revealed on social media that she was at the edge of homelessness if she could not raise money. If that was painful for her, the impetus behind this essay is not as self-indulgent as it appears. She did not relish publishing this, rather, she did it because Slate paid her for it, and she's still trying to make her ambitions work. She may or may not yet succeed, but there's something admirable—and, one fears, perhaps pitiable—in her dedication.
smartstakestime 8y ago
1) theres a reason we have the phrase "starving artist" ... its a feast of famine career. Talk about a degree meaning little. Liberal arts is the last place a degree matters. 2)beyond job choice or debt. Did this person not take internships during college??? Cry me a river. You take jobs during bachelor years, you get reccmondations talk to your employment office (most colleges have them) and you have something lined up (espcially for a grad). I smell that this person does not work well with others and bruned all of her bridges with her colleagues. Are we getting the full story, is this person good at what they studied and worked hard to make connections? Possibly not. This is an anecdote that should not be used as conclusive evidence of anything.
- jnbiche 8y ago
  > worked hard to make connections Yeah, but there are lots of people who are hard, smart workers, good at what they do, but they either a) don't realize how important it is to make connections in order to even survive in today's professional world, or b) were told that all they had to do to succeed in life is go to college, pick a realistic major, work hard, be honest, be trustworthy. Well, that's often not enough. You almost always have to have a large professional network in order to thrive in today's world. And many people struggle with that.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  I didn't even know internships were what you did in uni. I only did mine because everyone did them. Now I make an appréciable fraction of a million dollars a year. All because I applied to the places my friends recommended I apply to and did the things then that my friends recommend I do. The power of role models and established process is huge.
exabrial 8y ago
> bachelor’s degree in English, getting a master’s degree in creative I think people need to do a lot more research into career earnings and job prospects. These degrees have never paid well, which is unfortunate for the subject of the article.
gumby 8y ago
> "The space, which stretches out across several football fields and up four flights of stairs, does give the illusion of forced servitude. " Perhaps more than an illusion in practice: Nobody takes those jobs if they can find any alternative...and then the structure of those jobs (time commitment, low pay, inability to take time off) makes it hard to even look for another.
oculusthrift 8y ago
why did she have to make it about being a black woman? instead of the other factors. i know the same exact story but with white men.
- tnzn 8y ago
  Because stats show otherwise
wallflower 8y ago
The book “The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art" ballparks some figures on the Power Law distribution of artist incomes in a global city. Making a living as an independent creative is really hard. Marketing through channels like Instagram could help (10k true fans). Even creatives who get to be “creative” by way of being in an agency where they “apply” their creativity don’t have an easy life (constant deadlines and stress). Being creative on a deadline can definitely take the joy out of creating. So many people want to be a writer. There are tons of writer workshops/retreats. Usually they feature writers who have achieved some level of success. But the reality is that someone like Kristen Roupenian who got a book deal out of her “Cat Person” story that went viral was very lucky. The right story at the right cultural moment. > “40k artists resident in London (about same number in NYC) For London and NYC each: 75 superstar artists (>$1M/yr income) 300 mature, successful artists (>$100k/yr income) 5,000 part time artists (need to supplement their income)"

37 points by davesailer 8y ago

So many English grads, so few jobs.

She is a good writer. Probably could get a job as content creator at most start-ups and large companies. I wonder if she ever considered this path, unless I'm missing something.

matt4077 8y ago
Rightly or wrongly, she may have been put off by the lack of respect for the humanities so prevalent within the startup scene. Point of evidence: the gradual replacement of the term "author" with "content creator".
- vonseel 8y ago
  Point of evidence: the gradual replacement of the term "author" with "content creator". Your point is only one possible logical reason for why he would use the term "content creator" instead of author. Perhaps "content creator" is simply the term his previous employer used for authors. My previous employer called them "technical writers", I am not sure what the marketing department called their writers. Would that make me dismissive of her degree or the humanities in general?
- PeterisP 8y ago
  "Author" is a more specific term - there are many jobs that require ability to write well, but it doesn't involve any creation of original work or much choice of expression(as an author would), and it's entirely accurate to say that you're creating content according to your employers needs but you're not really an author or copywriter. E.g. writing summaries of other authors, semi-structured product descriptions, part of highly normative technical writing, and even fake reviews (it's a whole industry...) or astroturfing.
- solatic 8y ago
  > Point of evidence: the gradual replacement of the term "author" with "content creator". Please tell me more about "corporate authors" and why such a term doesn't denigrate the literary contributions of authors of traditionally published poetry and prose. Or do newspapers disrespect the humanities by calling their authors "journalists"? "Op-ed contributors"?
- scarejunba 8y ago
  My experience has been that, in SF startup culture, respect for the humanities is pretty strongly expressed. But not in the "I have a degree in writing" sense but the overwhelming belief that one must be a sort of Renaissance Man and be an artist or creator of some sort. It makes sense, actually. For many people in the culture, they're fairly comfortable (founders are few, employees many) and so they start looking up Maslow's pyramid.
solatic 8y ago
She works in San Marcos, TX and takes the bus to work (per the article). It's close-ish to Austin, but I doubt there are very many large companies and startups in San Marcos.

fullshark 8y ago

This person seems to think they are entitled to a living in art/poetry just because they got a graduate degree in it. Degrees don't ensure employment, marketable skills do, and we should not mislead students to this fact.

TAForObvReasons 8y ago
> I had pushed for a college education, believing that with it came job security and the freedom to pursue my writing without the burden of poverty. Without familial wealth or a serendipitous set of circumstances, I would need at least a degree to be competitive if I wanted to move up and over the poverty line. This is a line sold to millions of students in all fields of study. You may be unsympathetic, but given the systemic promotion of higher education over the last few decades it's easy to understand why she would believe the degree would be the ticket to an opportunity in the field of study.
vonseel 8y ago
I wouldn't go that far. I read the article in full, and it's an interesting description of the world behind the things many of us take for granted (Amazon, etc.) as well as some commentary on the author's own life journey. It sounds like she expected it to be easier to find a REAL job with a degree - teaching, creative writing, etc. - only to be surprised at the lack of opportunities for "non-professional graduates". My parents strongly urged all of their children to pursue professional, specific degrees: engineering, law, medicine, or accounting/finance. They reinforced time and time again that "liberal arts degrees" provided fewer career options, and to put it plainly, that I would probably end up broke if I chosen that path. I don't think they would have provided financial support to study something like, for example, music. Or even psychology, for that matter, unless the goal was to be a PhD/academic. I agree with your points, however, that degrees do not guarantee employment and we should not mislead students. Too many students think "degree = job". Having observed the Norwegian education system from afar (Norwegian mother & family), I advocate the way they do it and the way many Europeans have vocational programs and opportunities for technical training as an alternative to university. Even the janitors in Switzerland may train for as much as 3 years ( see https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/swiss-skills_training-to-be-the-best--champion-apprentices/41043876 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/swiss-skills_training-t... ). Although, I do not know how that would work in the American culture, where tradesmen typically are not respected and do not make as much money as engineers and the like. Income inequality is a much bigger problem here than in some of the Scandinavian and European countries. TLDR: degree != job, if paying for degree, get a technical one (engineering), accounting/finance, or legal/medical. Make good grades. Grades are more important in some professions than others. Don't expect to get a job with a liberal arts degree.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 8y ago

This is the dark underbelly of education/academia. Selling worthless dreams to young people on credit. If we didn’t have a perverse glorification of education in this country, we’d give the education industry the scrutiny and malign it deserves. (We go after pawn shops and pay day lenders but at least they provide valuable liquidity.) And there is also an oft-missed social justice aspect to all this. Professors and teachers are disproportionately white (and by definition, college-educated): https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61. We sell education as a way to overcome the legacy of systematic oppression of certain minority groups, but we are actually creating quite a large wealth transfer from disadvantaged minorities to college-educated white people. And members of these minority groups aren't seeing the pay-off from paying their tithes to the educational establishment. As the author notes in the article: > A 2014 study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research revealed that an incredible 55.9 percent of black recent college graduates were “underemployed” and working in a position that didn’t require a four-year college degree.

Judgmentality 8y ago
> If we didn’t have a perverse glorification of education in this country Is this true? I suspect large swathes of this country detest education. Nobody seems to be voting for better funding of schools - hell look at Oklahoma where school is only open 4 days a week. And that's an entire state! https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/with-state-budget-in-crisis-many-oklahoma-schools-hold-classes-four-days-a-week/2017/05/27/24f73288-3cb8-11e7-8854-21f359183e8c_story.html?utm_term=.2fbf46a9e73f https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/with-state-bu... While there are certainly people that champion education in this country, there are many that condemn it.
- rayiner 8y ago
  We outspend almost everyone else on education: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-glob... Our post-secondary education spending (college and above) is the highest in the world, and 80% higher than the OECD average. Oklahoma spends about $8,000 per student per year on K-12 education. If it were a country, it would fall between Italy and Spain on that statistic.

matt4077 8y ago

I remember (mis)using the local bookstore as my personal library during my childhood (late 80s, early 90s). The proprietor was somewhat in the mold of this author, and I learned a lot both from her as well as other patrons who stopped by, chatting, drinking copious amounts of free coffee, and buying books. In other words: it was one of those places that served far more purposes than just the economic one of distributing letters on dead trees. Then Amazon came along, and it was obviously far better, in many respects: suddenly, I had easy access to foreign language books, for one thing. But, less obviously, other benefits were lost. Mostly those that escape measurement by econometrics. Not just in terms of squeezing all there is out of people that are suddenly the subject of the economic force of an employer the size of Amazon. Small stores, within walking distance, i. e. the traditional "downtown" is gone, and with it all chances of surreptitiously meeting anyone from the mayor to your neighbour. It's all online now, or sometimes a big-box store outside of town within a barren cultural desert of parking lots and lots. But the argument is hard to make: why (and how) should anyone forgo cheap prices, or the comfort of intensely personal transport, for my vague yearning of community? And so it will continue, the better future, as imagined by Kafka and brought to the big screen in Wall-E. (presented here mostly as an alternative to the inevitable gloating of STEM majors over the failure of others to find a place in the world catering to their strengths and interests.)

deogeo 8y ago
> I remember (mis)using the local bookstore as my personal library during my childhood Did you not have a public library where you lived?
neetdeth 8y ago
Regarding that last point: It carries the assumption that people in STEMMFT (science technology engineering math medicine finance and the trades) do not have strengths and talents in other areas that they set aside to pursue their careers. Our society seems to have no problem taking a rational approach to something like, for example, basketball. Unless you are one of a few truly phenomenal people with the talent and drive to succeed professionally, playing basketball is a hobby. Full stop. You can count on coaches to (mostly) objectively advise you as to whether or not you are one of those people. Not so, the liberal arts. What was intended as a program of enculturation for the children of the wealthy elite has turned into a monster that devours the children of the working class, who are mostly not exceptional, and for whom an arts degree is an expensive diversion at best.

dvt 8y ago

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that the argument that only "marketable" skills are valuable is a farce. The United States is a cultural black hole and this article exemplifies why. Engineering, the STEM fields, and tech are also cultural wastelands. This is a major issue for me -- and one of the reasons I'm trying to get out of tech. Even if we ignore the fact that some of our greatest thinkers often had "non-marketable" proclivities (Newton was also an Anglican theologian, Einstein worked as a patent clerk, Bertrand Russell wrote poetry, C.S Lewis was an author, etc.), there's something deeply human about being able to put pen to paper. But, for whatever reason, we are losing sight of why poetry, music, and art is valuable. This is a wide-ranging problem and no one seems interested in fixing it.

fullshark 8y ago
> But, for whatever reason, we are losing sight of why poetry, music, and art is valuable. Everyone thinks those things are valuable, but due to nearly costless distribution of media the very best in their field can distribute their art to the entire world and we can enjoy it. It's a market that lends itself to superstar economics now, like spectator sports stars. As a consumer of art, it has never been easier to enjoy and appreciate it.
travisoneill1 8y ago
Marketable just means somebody will pay you for it. All of your examples were extremely marketable. The fact is that since poetry, art, and music scale so well, we only need a few professionals and therefore only truly exceptional people can do it. Why does a mediocre artist somehow have more value than a mediocre basketball player, for example?
mitchellst 8y ago
Yes, life is bigger than commerce. But your comment makes me wonder, "then, whose art should we value?" It's not that the US doesn't value art— highbrow or low brow, we have some of the finest museums of visual arts and the biggest of big-hair country music. We (more than) adequately finance both. Our resources, time, attention, and interest are finite, so how do you propose we choose whom to pay for their art? By MFA degree? School ranking? Random lottery? Honestly, I'm sympathetic to the author, not least because I think there's some irony in the piece. She recalls mournfully the time she revealed on social media that she was at the edge of homelessness if she could not raise money. If that was painful for her, the impetus behind this essay is not as self-indulgent as it appears. She did not relish publishing this, rather, she did it because Slate paid her for it, and she's still trying to make her ambitions work. She may or may not yet succeed, but there's something admirable—and, one fears, perhaps pitiable—in her dedication.

smartstakestime 8y ago

1) theres a reason we have the phrase "starving artist" ... its a feast of famine career. Talk about a degree meaning little. Liberal arts is the last place a degree matters. 2)beyond job choice or debt. Did this person not take internships during college??? Cry me a river. You take jobs during bachelor years, you get reccmondations talk to your employment office (most colleges have them) and you have something lined up (espcially for a grad). I smell that this person does not work well with others and bruned all of her bridges with her colleagues. Are we getting the full story, is this person good at what they studied and worked hard to make connections? Possibly not. This is an anecdote that should not be used as conclusive evidence of anything.

jnbiche 8y ago
> worked hard to make connections Yeah, but there are lots of people who are hard, smart workers, good at what they do, but they either a) don't realize how important it is to make connections in order to even survive in today's professional world, or b) were told that all they had to do to succeed in life is go to college, pick a realistic major, work hard, be honest, be trustworthy. Well, that's often not enough. You almost always have to have a large professional network in order to thrive in today's world. And many people struggle with that.
scarejunba 8y ago
I didn't even know internships were what you did in uni. I only did mine because everyone did them. Now I make an appréciable fraction of a million dollars a year. All because I applied to the places my friends recommended I apply to and did the things then that my friends recommend I do. The power of role models and established process is huge.

exabrial 8y ago

> bachelor’s degree in English, getting a master’s degree in creative I think people need to do a lot more research into career earnings and job prospects. These degrees have never paid well, which is unfortunate for the subject of the article.

gumby 8y ago

> "The space, which stretches out across several football fields and up four flights of stairs, does give the illusion of forced servitude. " Perhaps more than an illusion in practice: Nobody takes those jobs if they can find any alternative...and then the structure of those jobs (time commitment, low pay, inability to take time off) makes it hard to even look for another.

oculusthrift 8y ago

why did she have to make it about being a black woman? instead of the other factors. i know the same exact story but with white men.

tnzn 8y ago
Because stats show otherwise

wallflower 8y ago

The book “The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art" ballparks some figures on the Power Law distribution of artist incomes in a global city. Making a living as an independent creative is really hard. Marketing through channels like Instagram could help (10k true fans). Even creatives who get to be “creative” by way of being in an agency where they “apply” their creativity don’t have an easy life (constant deadlines and stress). Being creative on a deadline can definitely take the joy out of creating. So many people want to be a writer. There are tons of writer workshops/retreats. Usually they feature writers who have achieved some level of success. But the reality is that someone like Kristen Roupenian who got a book deal out of her “Cat Person” story that went viral was very lucky. The right story at the right cultural moment. > “40k artists resident in London (about same number in NYC) For London and NYC each: 75 superstar artists (>$1M/yr income) 300 mature, successful artists (>$100k/yr income) 5,000 part time artists (need to supplement their income)"