The Ivy Lie

“Hello Clayton,
It was a huge relief to come across your WordPress and see that there are other unemployed Ivy grads out there.

I just turned 23. I graduated from Brown a few weeks ago, and I am terrified of the future. None of my job applications have gone through (I only have a B.S. in biology, so I cannot compete with PhDs). Whenever I see a job posting, I see a wide variety of skills that I have explored at least once (e.g., Stem cell culturing, eastern blots, Java programming), but my skill set is spread too thin and unspecialized.

Due to depression, I was on sick leave for a year. For part of that time, I tried to turn one of my synthetic biology projects into a company (it failed spectacularly). When I got back I was effectively a second-semester sophmore that hadn’t received any of the advising that students go through before that time. Combined with my mistake of only taking the advanced biology and biochemistry classes, my GPA sunk to a 3.2 (which is not good when you’re at a school with a reputation for grade inflation). All my companies have failed. There is only one lab I have spent more than one year in, and for most of that I was just doing data analysis. I cannot even get a letter of recommendation from my PI (my thesis project of over a year lost all of its data in a catastrophic computer failure). Since I ended up collapsing from exhaustion during the last GRE I could take and still get my scores in on time, my dreams of grad school have been at the very least postponed for 1.5 years. I doubt I’d even be able to get into one researching Aging.

I am reaching out to people I know at a few labs and trying to ask them if I can work as an unpaid intern. At the moment, I don’t know of any other way of getting back into biological research. I cannot think of anything else in my life that makes me feel complete. I neglected fostering friendships during my time a Brown (I was so focused on school). I see all my classmates going off to well paying jobs, jobs that fill them with fulfillment, and jobs that are well paying and fulfilling. I don’t have any of those opportunities. I’m still mooching off of my parents, whom I still owe tens of thousands of dollars. I am trying to avoid relapsing into depression, but I am scared.

I am trying to get online certifications in machine learning and genomic data science. I’m also working with two nonprofits, one of which I am helping to design a probiotic that would produce anti-aging molecules. Neither of these are paid, I just need something on my resume. Despite this progress, I estimate that I have about 4 months left before I will no longer be able to live on my own.

I would very much like to talk to you about your experiences. Are you open to an informal Skype interview sometime?

Cheers,
[redacted]”