The Courtesy of Rejection

June 16, 2008

Learning proper etiquette was a big part of my upbringing. In my family, you knew the order in which to place orders at a restaurant (based on seniority, which translates to a combination of age and gender) and which bread plate was yours (left, same number of letters and two in common with ‘loaf’). Thank you notes for Christmas were always posted before New Years.

Now, entering that murky but decidedly threatening realm dubbed ‘the real world,’ I find it mercilessly bereft of etiquette, and I have absolutely no recourse.

I graduated college in June with a degree in Art History and have found myself virtually if expensively unemployable. Deciding not to go straight to grad school and not being investment banker material, I began to apply for entry-level administrative jobs at museums. I have been applying for nine months, trolling museum websites every few days between classes and internships, then full time at home after I graduated. Nine months worth of applications adds up; I would say I have applied for roughly eighty jobs.

I have been officially rejected by two of them.

It has been a long road since January, when my peers and supervisors at my college museum were assuring me I was destined to get a great job. I started out hopeful, even though the word 'recession' began to flicker on the edges of my consciousness. There were fewer jobs, and arts budgets were being cut. I still had faith.

Every week I would fire out more applications. Writing a single cover letter would eat up hours. I tried to go with a form letter: one for development positions, another for education positions, etc. I found that was a lot like a technique I tried to use in grade-school for my thank you notes: “Dear ___, Thank you for the ___. I really love it.” The form method in both cases flopped.

Each cover letter I would send was an interesting façade of fact and enticement covering outright desperation. It is true, I have good qualifications, but what I could not say outright was how I wanted a job so badly that I would work longer and harder than anyone else just to prove it.

One museum rejected me in a single line of email text: the position has been filled. Another sent me a form rejection, thanking me for my interest though they could not at this time offer me the position. I clung to this rejection as so much kinder than the first. By now, however, I would gladly welcome anything as short as the first. Key word: anything.

The logical side of my brain tells me that the human resources departments cannot possibly keep track of all applicants and coordinate mass rejection. This side of my brain also seems to laugh wryly and say, “Welcome to the real world, little girl.” I am not particularly fond of that side of my brain of late.

After all, I tortured myself over each cover letter: how to appeal most articulately, how to show my talents, how to stand out in the crowd. My resume is my little masterpiece, recording the things I have worked so hard to accomplish: awards, honors, magna cum laude, experience in the field.

The image of that resume languishing in someone’s email trashcan breaks my heart, but then, as an art history major, I am probably overdramatic with my images.

I walked around my college campus with an intoxicating self-assuredness. I understand that it is part of the deal to be squashed back down to where I belong: the absolute bottom of the food-chain, the new college-grad. I have found that the word “internship” in fact translates out of the erudite dialect of museums into a reality of unpaid, well-qualified labor.

Unlike most commencement addresses promise, I am abundantly aware how I cannot change the world, since I can’t seem to find an opening. I do not want to be an investment banker: I want to work in a museum. I want to talk to people about art. I want to communicate to my own generation how art is a record of what makes us human. I want to help others feel the new-love butterflies that I feel when I look at El Greco’s “View of Toledo.” I want to start an outreach program to fund the livelihood of students who would have internships at the Met but cannot afford to live in Manhattan. I want to break the closed socioeconomic circle of the art world, because as I see it, art belongs to us all. I have faith. I have a mission.

I just don’t have a job.