Amidst claims of “dumbing down” in higher education, one institution has responded by distributing branded goodies to persuade bright young school-leavers to pursue a degree…
04 Jul 2008 10:43
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This week’s Time magazine leads with an article about Mother Teresa’s apparently lifelong crisis of faith. In one letter to confidante Rev. Michael van der Peet, the “Saint of the Gutters” wrote “Jesus has a very special love for you… as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear”.
Mother Teresa’s despair is reminiscent of a thoughtful story by Miguel de Unamono. It is the story of a priest in rural Spain who is adored by the villagers for his piety, kindness and the majesty with which he celebrates the Mass each Sunday. His people revere him as a saint. To them his canonisation is a foregone conclusion and already they call him Saint Manuel. He helps them in the fields, tends them when they are sick, confesses them and comforts them in death. At the time of his own death he asks to be brought one last time to the altar where he dies leading the local populace in the Credo.
But the truth is that Don Manuel is not a saint. He is a martyr. For Don Manuel carries with him a terrible secret that only two others will ever learn: he is an atheist. His faith left him long ago. As he raises the chalice of wine, his hands tremble and he breaks into a cold sweat. He cannot stop the pretence for his people need him, and he knows that their need is greater than his own sacrifice.
Could it be that these two “atheists” have sacrificed more than many of those canonised before them?
04 Sep 2007 00:12
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What is the most unpopular job imaginable? Tax inspector? Traffic warden? Door-to-door salesman? Of these, perhaps only the stereotype of the pushy salesman provokes more annoyance in the average homeowner than does a religious canvasser with body odour. So why does anyone choose to work in this kind of job? This article explores a summer job which is becoming increasingly popular among students at Warwick.
Every summer between ten and twenty Warwick undergraduates travel to the United States in order to sell educational books. These students have been recruited by the Southwestern Company of Nashville, Tennessee. In Nashville they will attend an exhilarating week of training at ‘Sales School’ before departing for their individual sales locations which may be anywhere in the United States. On finding accommodation in their sales locality, they will begin the mammoth task of persuading the local populace to order from their selection of educational books.
The Southwestern programme begins with Sales School. Here students are asked to ‘suspend disbelief’ and are then treated to an impressive array of motivational speakers and inspiring sales advice. Mathematics undergraduate Rachael Smith, who sold books in Illinois, said that “Sales School is fantastic preparation for the challenges of the summer… it is a great way to start the programme which provides plenty of opportunities to put into practice everything learned in that first week”.
Despite the apparent value of Sales School, most of what students learn will be taught ‘in the field’. They will learn to work independently, to cope with rejection, to strive to meet goals and even a little about manipulating human psychology to their own advantage. In the meantime they stand to be compensated well for the trials and tribulations of being a salesman. While the average first year made around £320 a week in 2003, the top first year seller earned himself a gross profit of £1606 a week. Unlike most student jobs, sellers are not paid a fixed hourly rate and are instead considered to be running their own sales business. The most obvious consequence of this is that the profit they take home is directly related to their own hard work and resourcefulness. Successful students are additionally offered a holiday, paid for by the company, as a reward for their efforts. Previous ‘sizzler’ prizes have taken students to South America, Asia and to West Africa. Some students are further invited to return the following year having recruited their own team from which they earn a small sum for each book sold. In this way, one returning student in 2003 took home over £28,259 from his summer job.
The life of a salesman is not, however, all about working abroad, gaining transferable skills and amassing a substantial fortune in the process. In reality the work is often hard, lonely and thankless. Students who are ultimately successful on the Southwestern programme tend to be those who worked eighty hours for every week of the summer. Although students are paired together for accommodation purposes, they are essentially alone while on the job. This loneliness may be compounded by a feeling of rejection as so many people that they speak to will be trying to close the door on them. As one former seller put it, “there comes a point in the summer when you begin to wonder whether your own mother still loves you”. Furthermore, working for yourself in a strange country perhaps unsurprisingly raises all manner of obstacles which may prove difficult to overcome. Although Southwestern provides its sellers with solid practical advice, students are expected to organise not only their own sales but also their permits, book deliveries and accommodation. One Southwestern alumnus, Will Lau, warns that “students should think very carefully about exactly what the programme entails… it is certainly not a holiday”. Another former seller, Olivier Delpon de Vaux, said that “it’s the kind of job in which you have no other choice but to become resourceful… you find yourself having to achieve the impossible, but somehow you do”. Nevertheless, these obstacles go some way towards explaining why the Southwestern programme experiences a relatively high drop out rate compared to other student jobs. Quitting the programme, however, may prove costly as students will already have invested in paying for visas, flights and subsistence.
The Southwestern programme is not a typical student job and it is not suitable for everyone. Students working in sales stand to lose or gain much in terms of money, confidence and self-esteem. Successful sellers need to have vast reserves of motivation, determination and ambition to get the most out of a summer with the Southwestern Company. So why does anyone choose to work in this kind of job? For one, students who can claim that they successfully ran their own sales business in a foreign country for a summer will be left with a lot to talk about at job interviews. For example, Sean Russell, Director of the Careers Service, continues to be impressed at the “inventiveness and adaptability of students who embark on work experience of all kinds”. Employers are likely to take a similar view of candidates whose applications stand out in this way. The benefits of a successful summer, however, are likely to extend far beyond straightforward CV filling. According to Warwick undergraduate James Arthey, students who meet the challenges of the Southwestern programme leave with “a profound sense of self-belief that may spill out into academic work, extracurricular activities and into future career aspirations”. Quite simply, the Southwestern programme is character building. As James put it, “if you can succeed in a job like that… then you can do anything”.
02 Mar 2007 20:44
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Tags: Sales School Southwestern
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Writing about web page http://multiracial.com/site/content/view/213/40/
I have just read a lengthy article entitled ‘Twenty-one Arguments for Abolishing Racial Classification’ by a certain sociology professor named Yehudi Webster. The article is plagued with irrelevant points and scientific misunderstandings for which I would gain nothing by exposing piece by piece on this forum. I am however reminded of Einstein’s response to a 1931 pamphlet entitled ‘100 Authors Against Einstein’. “Why one hundred authors?”, he asked, “if I were wrong then one would have been enough”.
16 Dec 2006 19:26
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If ever there were awards in the category of ‘Humour in the Face of Poverty’, the competition would have to be held here in Los Angeles. Nominations would include the homeless I have seen variously proclaiming “will work for marijuana” or “support your local wine-o”. Another likely nominee walks up and down the Venice Beach promenade happily singing “jingle bells jingle bells.. help me to get drunk”. I suppose everyone is entitled to a drink at Christmas.
On a serious note, though, I have travelled through a lot of cities – including many in the third world – but have never before witnessed such a high degree of homelessness. To be sure, Rwandan children tried their luck with phrases such as “Mzungu! Give me pen!” or, more bizarrely, “Mzungu! Give me my money!”. I was, however, always confident that these children could return home – even if home was a mud hut – and that there they would have something to eat – even if that something was mpangwe. No such luck awaits the homeless of LA. With saturated private ownership of land, building something as simple as a mud hut would doubtless violate real estate legislation. This is perhaps unsurprising in a society where the very existence of beggars constitutes vagrancy and trespass. If there is anything fundamentally wrong with Western Capitalism, it is that it implicitly sabotages anyone trying to operate outside of the system.
Perhaps the award should, after due consideration, go to one beggar in particular. He is sat on the pavement, wrapped in blankets, behind a jar of dollar bills and a cardboard sign on which he has scrawled his fading message in felt tip pen. His message? “SAVING FOR A PORSCHE”. And the citation for his award? “The American Dream Lives”!
07 Sep 2006 09:00
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As an undergraduate at Warwick I was often struck by the observation that academic high achievers sometimes lack elements traditionally required of a basic education. I am talking, for example, of the humanities student who hated “everything the Conservatory party stands for” and the arts student who disapproved of greyhound racing on the grounds that “it’s so cruel.. the poor rabbit doesn’t have a chance”! I have often thought that this symptom must be unique to our generation as it is something I rarely notice in older people. Indeed this lack of basic knowledge, I believe, underlies much of the contempt held for students by ordinary working people.
The research project I am currently involved in requires a comparison of female magazines over the last four decades. I have in front of me, for example, an issue of Playgirl from October 1965. Articles in this issue include the following:
- Romantic Love… Is It Passe?
- I Investigated Five Psychiatrists
- The Truth About Campus Immortality
- The Topless Craze Will it Last?
- We Should … We Shouldn’t Premarital Relations
- History of the Diamond Engagement Ring
- Freeway to Beauty Isometrics for Playgirls
Compare these vaguely intellectual articles with the simple and hedonistic contents of Playgirl from October 1998 which include:
- The photos Hollywood’s heartthrob didn’t want you to see
- Orgasms forever: the big O in five easy steps
- Sexy soap stars in their naughty underwear
- Love thy neighbour – get some from next door
- Two guys, a girl and a pizza place
I do not need to provide any kind of quantitative analysis to make my point on this occasion. “America’s Magazine for the Chic and Modern Bachelorette” is clearly catering for a different audience today than it was forty years ago.
10 Aug 2006 11:46
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Writing about web page http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo
In 1996, physics professor Alan Sokal submitted a paper entitled 'Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity' to the fashionable journal Social Text. The paper was nonsense – from beginning to end it was a hoax. The article was a carefully crafted parody of the kind of papers submitted by many so–called 'intellectuals' working in the humanities.
Preparing such a work must have been labour intensive for Professor Sokal but thanks to computer scientists in Australia there is now an easier way to forge an academic career as an intellectual. This invention has been named the Postmodern Essay Generator. Each and every time you visit the site it will prepare for you a syntactically correct and entirely unique paper written in the style of a postmodernist intellectual. I have just composed, for example, a 3000 word paper entitled 'Narratives of Stasis: The deconstructive paradigm of expression and capitalist nihilism'. It really is that easy! Completed papers should be submitted to Social Text, 8 Bishop Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08903 double–spaced and in triplicate.
03 Aug 2006 22:49
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Having finished my finals, I find myself nosing through old photographs from my gap year. Now my memory has always claimed that I spent this year travelling, broadening my mind and doing good works. The photographs however tell a different story. Apparently I spent much of this time locked in mortal combat with gravity! Perhaps these offer a partial explanation as to why I am now so terrified of heights!
30 Apr 2006 14:32
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11 Apr 2006 15:51
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