Why Top Grads Are Unemployed Nowadays

So a few decades ago, if you went to a university, then you were basically guaranteed a job upon graduating. Nowadays, that doesn't really seem to be the case anymore because you have many people going to some of the top universities in the world and still not finding jobs like 6 12 months after graduating. And I've had a few of these cases as well. And some of my friends have also experienced that as well. So I went to the University of Cambridge and I graduated like 2 and 1/2 years ago almost. And some of my friends also studied STEM degrees like me. And then like six 12 months after graduating, they didn't have a job or they didn't have any job offers despite applying to hundreds of jobs. And then they just went back to do a masters or a PhD because it was better than being unemployed. And it's not a case of them getting bad grades. Like some of the friends in question have like first class degrees. They got like top 10 15 in the year group. And then I had other friends who got third class degrees which is the closest you can get to failing in the UK. and they managed to get jobs at Jane Street as a quantitive trader after graduating which is one of the highest paying jobs you can get. So it seems that like your grade in many cases just doesn't really matter when it comes to getting jobs. So I think it just boils down to the fact that there are way too many graduates who are doing the same things. So I think like 50 60 years ago in some countries like 10% of people went to university. Nowadays in many countries like 50 60% people go to university and as the abundance or like as amount of things increase like the scarcity of it decreases and the value of it decreases as well. And ultimately a lot of students go to university thinking they should only study and they spend all their time studying. They don't bother like doing any internships. getting any extra opportunities and so forth. And they spend the holiday studying as well thinking that the better grade they can get the better their job will be that they get. And whilst that might be true in some cases such as research even in research it's like loosely true the better grade you have the better research opportunities you can get. It's not true in like the general public. Like ultimately these days you have to be stacking things upon your university experience and university time. Like the friends who got jobs and job offers straight away and those who didn't what separated them was the amount of experience that they gained at during university in things unrelated to what they were doing like their degree. For example like my friends who spent all their time studying even during the holidays were studying and didn't do any internships despite getting really good results they still struggled to find a job. Whereas those who like spend their some holidays like doing internships they got return offers. They like met a bunch of like connections. They went to different places, events, conferences and so forth. They basically got their name known as being really good at one particular thing and then when they graduated they basically had people queuing up to hire them. For example, in my case, my YouTube channel allowed me to meet a bunch of interesting people during university and it gave me a bunch of experience in like video stuff and then that helps me like get some roles at a certain society and then I became the president of that society and then my name was pretty well known in that society and then like eventually I met like more people through that and then I got like a job offer pretty much immediately before I graduated and it's also the case for many of my friends who graduated like 2 years ago when they had a job offer straight away they had multiple on the cards and even whilst they were working like one two years into working. They had recruiters reaching out to them all the time being like, "Hey, can you work at this company instead? Like we'll pay you even better than your current company. " Because ultimately like the best people are usually already employed or they already have offers. So a recruiter's role is to basically identify like who is good like free word of mouth and free like online profiles and stuff and then try and poach them from the other company. And part of determining who is good at one particular thing is like kind of the word on the street. So, like if you go to university and you spend all your time shut in your room studying and you don't really meet anyone and no one really knows who you are when you graduate, you're going to have a much harder time finding a job or getting a job offer compared to someone who spent a lot of time like involved in societies like working on projects with people and by themselves getting their name kind of known, maybe even posting on social media. Nowadays, you have a lot of university students posting on Twitter about like projects they worked on. I think one pretty like famous case recently is this guy who made like a interviewer like coding helper bot. Um it's like I think his name is Roy or something and he's like 21. He like just dropped out well he got kicked out of the University of Colombia but he managed to like make a startup whilst he was there and he reached like $2 million in annual recurring revenue or something and that was like whilst he was a student and he now has like 50,000 followers on Twitter and that was just by making something whilst he was a student and getting his name known. So even though he's probably like expelled or will never get some job offers from certain universities and might not go back to college, he still has a bunch of opportunities lined up for him because of him having his name out there. So, for example, if you're studying engineering and you want to go into robotics in the future or something like that and you work on like projects on the side, but you haven't really done that recently because you spent so much time studying for your exams because you want to get a really high score, it's probably better to cut down the time you spend on studying and instead work on those projects, work with other people because the chances are that other people you work with will go on to other companies in the future. They might even start their own company in the future and they will still remember you and probably even want to hire you when they like graduate or when like much later in your career. And even like if you post about on social media, you might end up getting the attention of like some bigger robotic companies who would give

you offers to work there if you do something particularly cool or it goes viral. And it doesn't have to go that viral in terms of like millions of views. Like even a couple thousand views can often like change the course of your like career or trajectory. Or like if you're really into writing and you're studying literature and you want to be a writer in the future, chances are you may end up having a better job or better role like if you like published some of your writing online or you like made video essays and posted them online or something and then use that in your portfolio because you will stand out from many other people based on that than your actual degree or like based on your actual grade that you got in your degree. But the hard part about me giving you examples is that like there's no one clay path or one clay set of examples that can work for everyone. For example, at least when you're studying for exams, you can look at the textbook, you can follow the method, you can learn the method, and then you can apply it over and over again. Sometimes for some of these things that I'm telling you, like if you try and do the exact same thing, you might not achieve the exact same results, which is kind of like contradictory to what you're studying for in your exams. So, just because you saw one person go really viral on Twitter because they posted about some side project they were working on as a student and then they got a bunch of job offers or opportunities through that, like that may not necessarily work for you. And it might be better for you to like go on a different social media platform or to instead spend more time in societies or even make your own society or do something else. Like my point is basically you shouldn't spend all your time studying because nowadays it's like pretty clear that even if you study really hard, you may not necessarily get job offers. And I think it was Einstein who once said like an idiot is the one who repeats an action like over and over again expecting different results. So, it's kind of like this, like if you've seen many different people like spend way too much time studying, not doing any extra things or stacking things on top of their degree, and then you spend all your time studying and you expect different results and you expect to get tons of job offers and stuff, then like you got to realize like this is not the way anymore. Like whilst that might have been true like a couple decades ago or 10, 20 years ago, it's becoming increasingly clear that may not work as well anymore. especially now with AI because like AI can make it so easy for you to apply for like 500 600 different jobs or something because it fills in a lot of the application forms for you. But if everyone is doing that then all these companies are being overwhelmed by like five times as many or 10 times as many applications as they would have previously gotten. And then they use AI to also filter through the applications. So the chance of your application being lost is like much higher. And it's probably much better for you to get the attention of someone directly who works at the company who will help you get a job because often the people who get jobs at some of these companies like they don't apply there. They just get offered it by someone who already works there. Like it's probably better for you to get the intent attention of someone who works there through some means. And I think in my case like I remember one case I applied for a summer program and then I got rejected from the summer program. It was like a sort of starter pixel radio as such. It wasn't the Y cominator one it was like another one. And then like I just carried on doing interesting things during university and during college. And then eventually the person who was like the CEO of that accelerated program, one of the co-founders, he caught wind of what I was doing and he like noticed me and then he wanted to schedule a meeting with me. And I remember thinking during the meeting like should I tell him that he previously or like well not him particularly, his accelerator previously rejected me a year ago and it'd be kind of funny if I mentioned that in our conversation because he probably would have accepted me or like told me to reapply and accepted me straight on the spot instead. But this is like one of the things where like you can apply for something directly or you can do something cool and interesting and then get noticed by the people who are working or running the company that you would have applied for otherwise and then you can use that to get a job or like a job offer or even like lead onto other opportunities in some way. So yeah, maybe the video is a little confusing because there's no one clear path that everyone can take to like repeat what other successes people have had because it's like kind of contradictory to what you learn about in textbooks. But the point ultimately is that you can't spend all your time studying and then expecting to get a bunch of job offers because you have really high grades. Whilst it might work in some cases, for example, like doing research where you got to really and deeply understand the material, more often you would be better off spending more time like applying for internships or doing internships, getting work experience, like meeting people, doing different societies, maybe even running your own societies, posting on social media, and basically seeing what other people are doing as well. And then like trying to get noticed some way in the