Dignity on Aisle 29

“Good morning sir, looking for anything in particular today?”

“Uhh, yeah. I’m looking for one of those electric dog fences.”

“Hm. Ah. I think…I think those might be on aisle 27. Or 28. Somewhere around there. In that general area.”

“You think they might be somewhere around there?”

“Sorry, I’m new.”

“Oh. How do you like working here?”

“ Eh, it’s not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life, but it pays. I’m saving up for graduate school.”

“Graduate school, huh? What are you studying?”

“Archaeology.”

“Archaeology? Girl what are you doing working here for? Have you looked into any jobs up there round Jamestown or Williamsburg? There’s a lot of that kind of stuff going on there.”

I’ve quickly come to hate anyone who asks, “So what are you doing working here?” As if I haven’t already looked for jobs actually IN my field. As if I haven’t applied to said jobs. As if working in an over-glorified hardware store is just fine with me. Because you know, I probably just haven’t been looking hard enough for a job. After all, how hard can it be to snag an entry-level position in archaeology? It’s not exactly a field you hear a lot about so it must not be very competitive.

People who ask, “So what are you doing working here?” have either:

1) Never been unemployed.

2) Have not been unemployed for a very long time and forgot what it’s like.

3) Have absolutely no idea what the Catal Huyuk they are talking about when it comes to archaeology.

Let’s address point 3 in a little more detail. Archaeologists are tenacious little bastards. They sit in their university or museum positions and hold on to them till they die; it is an extremely competitive field. Also, why pay people to excavate a site, when people will pay to do it for you? Archaeology enthusiasts often volunteer at excavations, offering to do backbreaking labor under the hot sun for free just for the glimpse of a lost piece of the past, and anthropology students will sell their mother on the street to pay for attending field schools (Anyone looking for a Mom in exchange for a field school in Turkey? She might not be the best cook but she's great company for a shopping spree!).

During the first month of the job hunt I took hours to painstakingly craft resumes and cover letters for every “entry-level” position I could find. I applied for positions as an Archaeological Aide, Archaeological Technician, Archaeological Assistant, Archaeological Assistant Technician, Aid to the Archaeological Assistant Technician, etc. It’s amazing how quickly your standards drop after a disturbing absence of any response, even rejections. The next month I decided it would probably be best to branch out a bit. I applied to a myriad of clerical and secretarial positions, because hey I make a mean Xerox and direct phone calls like a phenom. By month three I humbled myself and just started filling out applications for any and everywhere; local restaurants, shoe stores, book stores, coffee shops, department stores.

Eventually I lost track of all the places I had applied to (though I suspect it lies somewhere in the low thousands), not mention most of my sense of self-worth, social life, and sanity. So when I finally got that one call back from a home improvement superstore, who promised almost a dollar over minimum wage, and a schedule just minutes shy of being fulltime so they don’t have to give me any benefits…I grabbed it desperately with both hands. So don’t judge me when you come asking what aisle airfilters are on. They’re on aisle 29, right next to the remnants of my dreams and dignity.

A Brief Introduction

I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte on December 19^th of 2009. I graduated Magna Cum Laude (lat. trans.: Totally Badass) with a 3.81 GPA, membership in several well-known honor societies, a B.A. in anthropology, and a minor in art history. I had worked hard and it had paid off. My entire family is college educated and walking across that questionably constructed stage in the middle of the Halton Arena in funereal robes was more than anything a coming of age rite signifying that I had at long last joined their adult ranks. It is the single proudest moment of my life thus far. I truly believed that finally, this was it, the beginning of my life! I had all that school fuss out of the way. Soon I would bravely be forging ahead in the real world to pursue my dream of becoming a world-renowned archaeologist (with her own History Channel show nonetheless).

Four months later I found myself back in swampy tidewater Virginia, sitting in a Panera Bread across from a friend, simultaneously trying to wolf down a Cuban Chicken Panini and confess my deepest heartfelt anxieties that I was already a failure. Instead of digging up projectile points of a Late Woodland Period site or studying the change in burial patterns throughout the Bronze Age of Greece—I am living at home with my parents, working 9 to 5 for the nation’s favorite hardware-store-on-steroids-and-a-penchant-for-fluorescent-orange, with nothing to do on a Friday night, longing for the friends and good times that I left 342 miles to the south.

Post-graduate life is not exactly what I had expected. I wasn’t naïve enough to assume that once I graduated I would be offered a job in the field or a graduate school scholarship on a gold platter, but neither had I expected the journey to be quite so torturous. Between applying to graduate programs, applying for jobs, being accepted and rejected from both, deciding which to choose, interviews, searching for scholarships, searching for a place to live, coming up with a budget… I’m not sure how many people realize just how hard the process can be, and how easy it is to lose heart. I’m not expecting many people to read this, mostly I am doing it for myself, as if somehow publicly chronicling the odyssey will make me more accountable for the need to achieve it rather than settling for something less. But for those who do stumble across goldenmarshalltown.blogspot.com, especially those who are about to leave the safe haven of the undergraduate world or find themselves in a similar position, I hope it will show that they’re not alone and help prepare them for the leap.