Wesleyan has the CRC. This is a department that nominally helps seniors (and others) find jobs, internships, positions at graduate school, and other out-of-school opportunities. This is great; Wesleyan is without a doubt a bubble, and guidance through the arcane process of catching your feet in the real world is greatly appreciated.
Too bad the CRC provides none of that.
Their primary purpose appears to be post-graduation gold-digging: putting people in positions of high income so they can donate back to Wes. They are very nearly worthless if you *don’t* want to go into finance or consulting (or financial consulting). I’m a math/science major pursuing graduate school. This entails quite a few things: I need to take the GREs, figure out where I’m applying and which potential advisors are researching topics I’m interested in, get letter of recommendation, etc. The CRC does nothing whatsoever to help me with these. The GREs, for some reason, are never held on Wesleyan’s campus, and the CRC does nothing at all to organize transportation to where they *are* held. Thus, I’m left scrambling to find carpools or time in my day to take a bus, since getting off campus is difficult at best. Thanks, CRC! Similar difficulties apply to *every* other aspect of the application process, and the CRC is similarly useless for all of them. People in other fields tell me about receiving a similar complete lack of any sort of attention. They have a specialist for financial fields and the premed and prelaw advisors, and nobody at all for sciences or graduate school? Come on.
Let’s now pause for a momentary interjection on the sciences at Wesleyan. The sciences are what *make* Wesleyan. Sure, we’ve got good humanities and social sciences, but so do every single decent liberal arts college, and there are very many of them. On the strength of our liberal arts, we’re nothing special at all. But our science departments are unusually good for a liberal arts school; in fact, they’re unusually good for a school of any description. They’re one of the major draws. So why are we completely ignoring them in the realm of post-graduation guidance? I can see the taglines now: “Sure, you get to work with great professors, but you’d better hope they remember something about applying to grad school because they’re the only guidance you’ll get.” Yeah, that’ll attract applicants, guys.
Now, grubbing for money is an old and venerable institution, and while I can’t really be said to approve of it I at least don’t hate it utterly. Universities have budgets they need to fill. And certainly pestering alumni for money is nearly as old and venerable as grubbing in general. Hell, my high school has somehow convinced itself that I have money I’m dying to give them. This I will accept as a necessary evil, but I demand that it wait until I have in fact graduated and not interfere with my life. Hence, this: CRC, get your act together. Help me do what I need to do to do what I want to do, and stop paying lip service to that while doing absolutely nothing.
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