Recent college graduate Bradley Dempsey struggled to land a permanent journalism job after his local newspaper hired him fresh out of college as a reporter and laid him off two months later due to budget cuts.
Instead of sulking, however, he decided to write an article about it for The Columbia Daily Tribune.
Dempsey said despite the fact that he has been stocking shelves and bagging groceries for IGA two years after earning a degree in communication, he is undeterred in his goal "to work as hard as I can, as long as I can, until my shift is complete. I can’t outsmart everyone I encounter, but with the right effort, I can outwork them. Though I do not want to stock shelves the rest of my life, I believe I will achieve better in the near future."
This mindset he dubbed the "Stock Boy Mentality," meaning "take stock in hard work paying off" in all arenas of life. He said long shifts, low pay and thankless work does not necessarily constitute wasted time for a college graduate. After all, income is income, it is an opportunity to pick up useful knowledge and occupational skills, and society does not owe you anything just because you decided to go to college, said Dempsey.
"The worst thing a person can get is a sense of entitlement," Dempsey said. "When I lost my job at the newspaper, I thought I was entitled to be a journalist again and deserved every position in journalism I applied for. In fact, I thought I deserved a job for every position I applied for, journalism or not. ... This was entirely the wrong idea. ... Some people would say, for the past two years, I wasted my education and my hard work, but I see the opposite."
To discover his hard-learned life lessons, read the full article here.
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